Congratulations to some new parents

Adoption is good. Of course, being adopted, I am slightly biased towards the practice. ;)

Paint me a picture

How did Michelangelo do it? My feet and shoulders and arms are killing me.

Back in the saddle

The Timekeeper is back on his own server after a period of exile on Blowspot™.

Useless Nations

Conrad has the best line on the current situation in Africa:

Man first developed in Africa, but ceased doing so there some time ago...

The linked article is to a description of a charming cultural display of alternative cuisine choice (or an act of cannabalism, as we unreconstructed non-PCfied Haters prefer to say):

The militiamen calmly cooked the flesh over an open fire before throwing their victims, some of whom were still alive, into the flames. "They were both moving, although very weakly," Ruta said. It is accounts like this that have galvanized the horrified world into action.

Conrad then goes on to lambast the alleged "galvanized" world, and specifically the United Nations -- which Our Tax Dollars™ supposedly pay to solve these very "problems" -- for basically shrugging its collective shoulders and saying "Africans -- what more can you expect from them?" Reason No. 9987 why the UN building should be slapped with an eviction notice and its occupants shipped off to the Orkney Islands.

O sole mio

There's a new scourge. What are you doing here? (Scroll down to the latest scourge -- it's a Blogspot site, you know.)

Crapola

Nothing like waking up in a foul mood and then having to unplug and replug the cable modem because the line is clogged or whatever the hell that problem is where it won't fricking connect to anything.

What I need

I need a goddamn vacation. No, not an extra day off that is just long enough for me to catch up on all the sleep I miss during the work week. I mean a real, live, at least two-week-long vaycay. What would I do? Well, if I had all this free time (and if I had at least a couple hunnert bucks and was caught up on my bills -- these are the current obstacles to my fantasy getaway, by the way), I would drive up the Atlantic coast and maybe stop at a couple of beach towns. I'd drive all the way to Savannah, which is a cute little town, or it was the last time I was there in 1981. Then I'd drive up to Clemson, South Carolina and visit my aunt and uncle, who are getting on in years, and see my cousins that I haven't seen since the Seventies.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'd just drive up to North Florida and explore all the little towns. I dunno. I do know I would really like to see some parts of the country I have never been to, like the Midwest. Oh well. Blah blah blah. Must finish novel and shop out to publishers. Must finish degree and get "real" job again. Must break free of pall of apathetic discontent.

I promise

That no story or novel I write will ever feature characters communing with whales. Ever.

(Via Charles D. G. Hill.)

Jimtreacher.com

Yay!

Rock star on the loose

Uh oh -- someone get a net! Bob Geldof has escaped the compound and made statements critical of Robert Mugabe and the EU concerning food aid to Africa, and even worse, praised the Bush administration:

Bob Geldof astonished the aid community yesterday by using a return visit to Ethiopia to praise the Bush administration as one of Africa's best friends in its fight against hunger and Aids.

This will make the Bush=Hitler brigade fly backwards around their cages multiple times.

(Via Instapundit.)

Hole-in-none

Oh yeah, there's one little thing. I've been seeing various irate postings here and there (I can't remember where) on the matter of one of those sports dames trying to horn in on some guy-only competition. Normally I don't care one way or the other -- I'm not into sports, and I have no interest in the Feminist Struggle™ to integrate the sports world (aka "Make Them All Throw Like Girls, Inc."). But I had to laugh at some of the "sports are a guy thing" comments I've been reading, because the sport in this discussion is golf. For chrissake, it's golf, and I'm reading stuff about how women can't hack it against men, and so on. Can't hack what? Walking around in the sun? Picking a five-iron out of a bag that the caddy has been carrying? Riding around in those little carts? Wearing ugly pants?

Golf, it seems to me, is one of the few sports that you don't need an outie peepee to be good at. I think the guys were on safer ground as long as they stuck to pointing out that the lady-golfer-fembots were acting like little girls resentful that they weren't allowed in the boys' treehouse.

Please don't bother leaving comments in here about how I don't understand the game (well, duh), or that only men can play it "as it was meant to be played" (since it was reportedly invented by the Scots I imagine it really should be played in a light, barely-above-subfreezing drizzle while wearing a kilt, so you golfer guys in your ugly pants aren't playing it properly either -- and where are your sheep?), or any of that shizzat. I don't care.

The Wide Sargasso Sea

Well, I may as well take a ride on the light-blogging bandwagon. (Just surf the blogs, count all the ones that say "light blogging these days.") It's not that I have suddenly gotten one of those "life" things I keep hearing about, it's just that I have been in a writing slump, and have been singularly uninspired. Such is life. Perhaps I will change my mind ten minutes from now. Perhaps not.

With friends like these...

... a soldier in trouble is better off among his enemies. By "friends" I refer to the writer of this article, one Patrick Bishop, concerning the recently exonerated-of-war-crimes British Colonel Tim Collins. Colonel Collins was accused of roughing up and in general mistreating Iraqi POWs, a charge that turns out, shamefully, to have been trumped up by an American reservist who must have been the company brown-nose, if the petty complaints that apparently spurred his accusations are any indication.

Be that as it may, Mr. Bishop uses this episode and its happy outcome as an excuse to go off into an uncalled-for diatribe against the entire American military. We are referred to as Britain's "muscle-bound allies" and our soldiers' behavior is compared unfavorably with the shining perfection of the British:

Our soldiers, as soon as circumstances allowed, regarded the local population with rough sympathy, helping them and generally treating them as fellow members of the human race. They stripped off their body armour and helmets as quickly as they could to make themselves less threatening.

The Americans still bristle with weapons and look like martial Teletubbies, swaddled in layers of kit. They seem frightened of everything and everyone and their overwhelming concern is staying alive. To them, every Iraqi is a potential enemy, an attitude that is reinforced by the endlessly instilled doctrine of the primacy of Force Protection.

This sort of Victorian dimestore sentimentality -- British paragons of all that is righteous and true vs. brutish, subhuman American cave-soldiers -- is ridiculous, divisive, and tedious, as well as dehumanizing of the members of the British military that Mr. Bishop thinks he is lauding. It also has nothing to do with the case he started off talking about -- the American reservist who started all the trouble was apparently upset about, among other things, not being able to show off the same sort of ostentatious loving kindness that Mr. Bishop claims the British displayed. So what do the petty machinations of a "Milquetoast" like Re Biastre have to do with the bloviating about brutal, survival-obsessed American soldiers "bristling" with weapons?

Nothing, except that Mr, Bishop wanted to rant about the awful Americans, thus this long, disjointed, rambling column. A disappointment to find this nonsense in the Telegraph.

(Via NZPundit.)

Help a soldier out

A fire at Kevin's base wiped out the possessions of the servicemen whose tents burned down. He's got a Paypal button up at the site where you can donate.

Tricked-Out Hobbit-Hog

This is just so... wrong: The Lord of the Rings Harley Davidson. I've never been on a motorbike, but from the looks of it you could have a symbol of the Ring right in your crotch. Um. Okay. (Via The Onering.net.)

Movie nite

I just happened to catch The Faculty on SciFi tonight. Oh, okay, I taped it. Sue me, Elijah Wood starred, and I'm going through a cute young thing midlife crisis, though I don't see what's so "critical" about it. Anyhoo, the thing was billed as far as I have always known as a rather lame ripoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Leave it to movie people to totally ignore the fact that the film is actually a shoutout to Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad waste of time, though the concept the filmmakers had of what high school is -- or was, in 1998 -- supposed to be like was hilarious. Were they all home schooled -- or more likely, did all the screenwriters graduate from Beverly Hills High? I also had somehow missed the fact that John Stewart was in it, and got to come to a bad non-end -- you'd have to see the film to know what I was talking about. And the ending was a little too pat, leaving one wondering, in the way these films do. Worth renting out as part of a two-for-one bargain.

In between preparing dinner and setting up the vcr I caught bits of the previous offering, Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. I had thought about taping it too, but the bits I saw made me rather glad I didn't bother; it didn't look like one of Polanski's better efforts. Perhaps I should watch the whole thing. Maybe one day if I have nothing better to do, but I have already suffered through a Bad Polanski Film, which I actually paid to see (Bitter Moon), so I don't see myself seeking it out, even for the novel sight of Johnny Depp made up to be a graying-haired, bespectacled scholar.

I forgot to add: the version of The Faculty that Scifi chose to show was the cleaned-up, one might say Tipper-Goreized, version of the film. That struck me as just so wrong; when you know that a character said "Fuck you," not "Forget you," that throws the whole viewing experience off-kilter. For chrissake, the thing was on at 9:30pm EST, when all impressionable young things are ideally supposed to be in bed dreaming of Spongebob Squarepants, or whatever. Family Hour is over at nine pm, or it is supposed to be. A minor point, maybe, but it bugged me.

Well, heck

Bleat is taking the day off. So what are us Lileks junkies supposed to do -- make up our own clever-yet-profound slice of life essays? Jeez.

Thank you!

This is just a shout-out and a thank you to those folks who have contributed to the Spleenville fund this week. What can I say but -- thank you! Among other things, the increase in my pot o'gold has enabled me to invest in Dr. Frank's Eight Little Songs CD. Dr. Frank, he of the much-heard-of Mr. T. Experience, is the source of the song "Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy." You all should at least download that song, and at ten US smackers the 8-song collection is a bargain. (Also check out "Institutionalized Misogyny." He reminds me of John Wesley Harding (you may remember him for his cover of Madonna's "Like A Prayer" -- which sounded like a halfway decent song in his hands).

Memorial Day

My observance.

Michael Moore's website hacked shock

Michael Moore's website has been hacked. The management here at Spleenville would like to go on the record as declaring the hacking of someone's website to be a deplorable and antisocial act. ("Hahahahahahah!" "Shut up!" "You shut up it's funny!" "Is not! Hee hee -- I mean -- you bad person you! Oh hahahaha...")

And here is the screen capture, for posterity. I trust that Mr. Moore's web administrator's put an end to this hilarious heinous act posthaste!

The latest from Iraq

Salam Pax has new stuff up. Interesting. (Blowspot™ is working today. Visit while you can.)

Via Jeff Jarvis.

Quote of the week

While watching an interview on MTV2's Headbanger's Ball show, I heard this answer to a question on dancing styles at heavy metal concerts: "No one dances man; I haven't seen anyone dance at a metal show in years. They beat the crap out of each other!"

Rhymes of Doom

The Goth Poetry Generator. Go on. You know you want to.

(Via Electric Venom.)

Forty

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me!

Unfortunately, I'm stuck at work for the duration. :(

Update 10.27PM EST: Woah! It's like a party on my blog! Thanks, guys!

Second update: great people have been born on May 24th! Go send Katherine a happy birthday greeting.

Lullaby

Okay, here's a Goth mp3 to soothe you to sleep, or something:

"The Passion of Lovers" -- artist: Bauhaus.

Yes, I'm feeling nostalgic. Get it while it's hot (the best way: right-click and "save target as") -- I'm not going to leave it up on the site forever.

Return of the King Pics

Good ones, available here. Dig Fierce Pippin. Yum.

Birth, School, Work, Death

I was just listening to an mp3 of that song that I downloaded from someone (probably Michele, the music download queen) when I thought to myself: "What ever happened to the Godfathers?" Well, according to this website, some of them have gotten together with some of the Damned and formed a band called the Germans. That sounds positively evil. Ah, I've seen the Damned and the Godfathers more times than I can count. Well, every time they came down to Florida anyway. I only would leave the state for bands like Bauhaus, the Cure, and U2. (One day I really need to post my experiences of all three trips to see the aforementioned bands. That and my trip to New York in 1996, supposedly to see UK band Suede, but really an excuse for me at least to finally go to New! York! City!)

Freaky Friday

Sort of watching Fright Night Part 2 on Scifi while tooling around here. I just had this revelation: vampire movies are the softcore porn of the horror movie genre. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Not ready yet

Dang. I hate it when I almost get an idea, and in the few seconds it takes Word to fire up and present a blank page, the idea fades into puerility. Crap.

And the band played on

Well okay, I figured out how to get Windoze Media Player to copy songs from my cds. Now to figure out how to save the resulting .wma files to mp3 format. Just in case I've downloaded a free mp3 ripper from CNet, because when you come right down to it, the hell with Windoze Media Player.

Pity Party Cancelled

Oh look -- it seems that Saddam-offspring Uday has surfaced, sorta, and wants to cut a deal. See, he's afraid (in traditional spawn-of-evil-leader fashion) of his own people getting hold of him. But gosh, we don't seem to be too interested. I'm afraid that this time my atom-sized violin doesn't want to be bothered to play a sad tune for his plight. (Via Lt. Smash.)

Free Floating Musical Angst Dept Report

I do like Cold's song, "Stupid Girl."

I might as well come clean here and say that other songs I like are Queens of the Stone Age's "Go With the Flow" and P.O.D.'s "Sleeping Awake."

Stupid people catcher

I suppose there are a lot of people who, seeing an email from address "microsoft@support.com," and reading the cryptic subject "important information!" and the equally cryptic message "all information is in the attached file" would be so unwise as to click on said attached file, which was labelled "screensaver" and called something.pif.* However, I am not one of those people.

*I forget what, because I deleted it immediately.

The Pendulum and the Pit

Mrs. du Toit has a warning for society. I had the same thoughts watching and reading the shenanigans of antiwar activists. Radical behavior beyond a certain point will change society all right -- but not in the direction that the radical activists want to go. That might fulfill their martyrdom fantasies in the short run, but in the meantime people that they supposedly wanted to "help" and who do not enjoy living on the lam will suffer.

It came from the Eighties

Belfegore? Oh my god.

Things I did not know

If I lived in Wilmington, Delaware, I could live on the banks of the Brandywine River. This has been your six-degrees-of-separation-from-Middle-Earth moment.

Important announcement

Hey, Tim Blair fans, reset your blogrolls: Tim has moved into the spleenville universe, and can now be found at http://timblair.spleenville.com.

Can I just say one thing

I really, really, really hate Blogspot and Blogger. HATE them. That web service is dead to me. DEAD, do you hear?

I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Consume mass quantities

My mug is on its way.

Movable Headache

Dang, I forgot how much of a pain in the ass setting up a separate MT blog is. I should have just made a spin-off from my set. Anyway, stay tuned for something spiffy.

What the hell?

I haven't said anything about the Jayson Balir Scandal™, because feh, the New York Times, what a surprise... but I came across this article (via a commenter on Michele's site) and the last line gave me pause, to say the least:

"I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona," he said. "So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die."

In the parlance of these times, dude's got major issues. Wanker.

Michael Moore is Ted Rall's Gay Lover!

It's all true!

My aching skull

While I wait for developments re server setups and such (in prep for Tim's Big Move! Soon to be showing at a theater near you -- but is it horror or comedy?) I will tell you all about my headache, and how I went to bed early (around midnight is early for me 'kay?) expecting to get up early, like before ten am, and instead woke up very early with a sinus headache so I had to take some meds and go back to bed and didn't get up until noon.

On second thought, no I won't. Such a dull subject.

Booger eatin' moh-rons

Oh look: it's a reasonable, truth-telling, freedom-lovin' website! Sigh -- I only wish there were more of these -- it must be so hard for the Enlightened Ones to get to a computer from their cells in the Gulag. Fight the Man! (And why wasn't I included on this list! I'm twice as insane and fascist-loving as any of those other pansy websites!)

(Via Grouchy Old Cripple.)

Movement of the Blogs, cont.

Huzzah! Damian Penny is free of Blogspot!

News on the widows of the Bali terrorist attack

In this post I expressed my ire at what some of the Balinese widows of last year's terrorist attack on their island were being put through. But there is good news -- they have some help. Read the last comment in the post and check out AdoptA.

Communication breakdown

Argh. Frustrated with trying to open Tim Blair's site, I sent him this email:

How about: timblair.spleenville.com? I can set it up in five minutes. Think about it -- a nice new NON-BLOGSPOT blog running Movable Type or some other easy-to-use software that won't crash or disappear your archives.

I am sending this because I have had it with trying to load your site today. If I can save just one blogger from Blogspot.... ;)

So how about it?

Andrea Harris
http://spleenville.com/

And I mean it too. Consider it my service to the snarky-Aussie¹-dependent segment of the Blogosphere². But there seems to be something wrong with his email -- I could swear all it did was bounce my email back -- so I'm posting it here in case he or someone happens to surf by my site.

1. That's for whoever keeps searching through my site for "aussie" references.
2. Term invented by Bill Quick. I disavow all responsibility.

I should not have read this

Gee, thanks, Mr. Cosh, for making me regret eating that peanut butter sandwich just now.

Michael Moore is fat

Let me repeat: MICHAEL MOORE IS FAT.

He is a huge lardass, fattyfatfat, Fatty McFatperson Three-Big-Macs-Per-Minute Corpulent Sack of Fat. And his ego is ten times as fat. His self-regard is swaddled in layer upon layer of fat.

He is a BASTARD who is FAT.

That means he is a FAT BASTARD.

FAT FAT FAT.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Fatass fact-checked

It looks as if Michael Moore is going to try to spread that old lie about the planes that supposedly flew the Bin Laden family home on September 11th. Here's the entry on Snopes.com debunking this myth.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Cruel and Unusual?

Concerning the discussion of what sort of music to "break" Iraqi POWs, I think that we shouldn't try soppy pop music that makes the normal red-blooded American sick to his or her stomach. In my admittedly limited experience (one trip to Europe, watching those European music awards shows on cable teevee, going to Vietnamese restaurants here in Orlando, seeing those endless commercials for the inexplicably beloved Nana Moskouri's "hit songs" collections) the Whole Rest of the World has a bottomless appetite for soppy pop music (such as the songs in this list, especially ones like "Sometimes When We Touch.") I'd try some Death Metal instead -- maybe some Cannibal Corpse or Malevolent Creation. Yes, those are real bands.

I forgot to add: the year I went to Europe (1981) there was no excape in any country I went to from ABBA's "Fernando" (the last on Iowahawk's list). Everywhere we went that song was playing on some loudspeaker system somewhere. Even Scotland.

Desecration

The recent World War II Remembrance Day ceremonies in the Netherlands were disrupted and desecrated by Moroccan youths. Here's a portion of an account by Peaktalk on these incidents:

I wanted to share this with you as Dutch newspapers last week reported that Moroccan youths had disturbed a number of these ceremonies throughout the country earlier this week. In one instance by throwing eggs onto participants and in another by playing football with the wreaths. The absolute bottom was reached when during the ceremony in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs a number of these youths shouted “we must kill the Jews”. This under any circumstance is a grieving and depraved comment, but to shout it out in a city from which 100,000 Jews disappeared never to return during the most sensitive of commemorations is beyond belief and it was no doubt perpetrated on purpose. I am not writing this as yet another piece seeking to provide further evidence of the ever growing levels of anti-Semitism Europe, although that would certainly warrant a post on this site. What happened last week goes well beyond anti-Semitism.

Via Dilacerator, who says incidents like these are being covered up.

If looks could kill they probably will

Here's a little something to keep us all occupied while we all wait until December to roll around: Tolkien computer games.

Or you could go play Tolkien Baseball.

(Yes, I am feeling to ill to post anything of note tonight. Darn stomach virus.)

Goth not dead!

It's undead. Gaze upon a short Flash film on vampirism and stuff, starring Andrew Castel-Dodge. This takes me back to those days of dancing all night at the Kitchen Club... (or, in my case, staggering in place; I dance about as well as the average day-old corpse).

Movin' on out

White House Press Secretary (and according to some, raving attack dog!) Ari Fleischer is resigning. I can dig it. Being press secretary during a war is one thing, but during a presidential campaign? I'd be out of there too, so fast I'd leave skid marks on that little stage they use. ( Via Instapundit.)

Shout out

Steven Den Beste has a column on OpinionJournal. Way to go. (Via Cut on the Bias -- if Den Beste said anything about it on his own site I missed it.)

Sleight of hand

Mr. Bill Whittle weighs in against magical thinking. I told my Medieval Humanities professor that the majority of people in the world were still in thrall to the sort of superstitions that supposedly had been banished by the Renaissance, or maybe it was the Enlightenment. I'm not sure he believed me, but then again he was from some place like Pakistan, so maybe he did.

Shot from a cannon

Concerning so-called "assault rifles" and the proposed ban thereupon -- I have a few things to say. No -- actually, I have just one thing to say:

ALL RIFLES ARE ASSAULT RIFLES YOU FUCKWITS.

Jesuschrist when is the stupidity going to end? You can't say "that there is an assault rifle" as if there was otherwise such thing as a "cuddle gun" that gives you a hug instead of putting a hole in you, or a "warm blanket rifle" that tucks itself around you to keep you from getting a chill. This "assault rifle" thing is beyond stupid, something only a nanny-wannabe from Betty Friedan's suburban hell could possibly think actually was a sane category. Guns, rifles, knives, etc., are weapons, and weapons have one main purpose, and that is to assault the other fool before he can assault you. That's what self-defense is, by the way (let me just insert this here for the benefit of all those people who keep whining about the US and its "pre-emptive wars"). It's not some sort of Disneyesque ideal of standing Staunch and Firm and Frowning Authoritatively and Speaking in a Loud, Clear, Calm Voice to the world's villains until they are overcome with the shame of their own perfidy and slink away to sulk in a cave.

Anyway, Frank's list is funny. Read it.

Warm Featherette

The American Imperial Cultural Hegemon continues its invasion of the pristine sands of the Middle East! Oh the humanity! When will it end, when????

Just one more before I go

I fell in love with a car last night.

Really: on my way to my car after work last night there was a vehicle parked next to mine that immediately awakened my quite irrational machine lust. It was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a four-door, and it was by no means a late model car. It didn't have that stupid rounded-corners look that all the cars, trucks, and SUVs have sported for the last few years. I can't explain it -- I just love square, boxy little car-truck things. Sure, the rounded look is aerodynamic and all that and saves gas and keeps us from smothering the whales with ozone or something. I still prefer the square look. Also, it had those handicapped-unfriendly push-button door handles. It looked (as far as I could tell in the sodium lights of the parking lot) to be in pretty good shape. I've been sitting here wondering if I should trade my little expensive rice-burner in for a used Jeep Cherokee. These almost-three-hundred-dollar-a-month payments are killing me. (I also like Land Rovers, but they cost the earth.)

Future posts

I'm putting this up to remind me of some posts I want to do today, when I get around to it/have more coffee in me:

A subject near and dear to my coal-black heart has been brought up by Steven Chapman (at 12:46 GMT on Sunday May 18) and Brian Micklethwait over at Libertarian Samizdata: High-Brow Littrichoor vs. what people actually want to read.

Speaking of Tolkien (heh), I've been wanting to post for some time on some things he brought up in an essay in The Tolkien Reader called "Ofermod." (That's an Anglo-Saxon word that means something like "hubris" did to the Greeks, only not really.) Maybe if I put this reminder note here I will get to it.

I was going to blog about China Miéville's scifi-fantasy-grotesque novels but I have yet to read Perdido Street and The Scar all the way through. So that will have to wait.

I can't resist rattling the bars of the cage: A.C. Douglas tossed a brand onto the fire a few days ago when he asserted here that there are more quality female-written blogs than male-written blogs.¹ Naturally I have something to say about that. (Muahahaha... rubs hands together in wicked anticipation.) (1. Update: must... concentrate... must... learn to count/read/see/type... But I still have much to say about gender superiority in writing. Or, well, something, anyway.)

In the comments to this post, my assertion that college isn't necessary for everyone ruffled some feathers. I'll be expanding on my reply there. (Maybe I should add that permalinking feature for individual comments to my blog. We'll see.)

Boycott Hollywood links to this interview with Janeane Garofalo. My opinions on what she has to say are forthcoming. (Side note: "forthcoming" -- now there's an Anglo-Saxon word-formation.)

I can't remember anything else I want to do a post on right now, but I'm sure I'll think of more later. But I think this is enough for now.

Late Nite Teevee Follies

The conspiracy to keep me from liking teevee continues apace: last night, afflicted with my usual insomnia (when two glasses of wine and an antihistamine don't do anything to knock me out I think that qualifies as insomnia) I lay in bed and flipped channels on my bedroom teevee. Since the bedroom set isn't hooked up directly to the box, I don't get all the channels, but I do get Scifi on it. Last night there were back-to-back made-for-Scifi offerings. I left versions of the following in the comments to this post of Michele's on bad movies, but I was so proud of them (har har) I thought I'd offer them to all five of my readers:

Speaking of awful movies, do tv movie series count? I'm thinking of something the Scifi channel has started playing called "The Deathlands." It's some post-Apocalyptic crapola filmed all in orange. I guess it's to convince us that in the future all our cyan filters will have been destroyed. Best line so far, from former porn star Traci Lords: "Die, Mutie bitch!" ("Mutie" as in "mutant" -- mutant meaning you have long red hair and look smashing in a ragged leather minidress.) There's also a hero with an eyepatch.

Right after that thing was over the next movie on Scifi was something called "The Apocalypse." It was some sort of thing set in outer space. It featured that chick from Sex, Lies, and Videotape (the bad sister) playing a crazy woman in a space ship whose dialogue consisted of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and Sandra Bernhard playing a captain of a space ship. I would have watched the whole rancid thing but I needed to sleep, and I haven't hooked the videotape machine up to the cable. (This was also filmed all through some sort of rust-colored filter. Are they having budget problems at the Scifi channel? They can't seem to afford to use the entire color spectrum.)

Betrayer

There I was happily half-listening/not-really-watching Headbangers Ball on MTV2 when they started showing that guy from Staind playing live in the studio. Noooooo--!

Quick... channel change... Ahhh. Saved by Motley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls" on Vh1 Classics.

Update: MTV2 is having Unplugged now, that's why the bald, ugly, depressing Staind guy is still on. Fortunately, Vh1 Classics is having repeats of old heavy metal and hair metal band videos. I needed some cheese tonight.

The Matrix, Exploded

Ah, the Matrix Reloaded: "It's hot!" "It's cool!" "It sucks!" "It's the Best! Movie! Ever!" "It's a huuuuge disappointment!" "It's got Christian themes!" "No! It's got Buddhist themes!!!" "You're a sucker to go see it!" "No! You must go see it!"

For chrissake people it's just a movie. It stars Keanu Reeves, for godsakes. I didn't see the original Matrix in the theater, I saw it at a friend's house on his big screen tv. It was okay. I enjoyed it. The plot was fairly clever for movies of this sort, and the cgi and all that was amusing. But still, it was your basic hero vs. villains rescuing the fair maiden tale. And anyway, we know what movie you really should be anticipating as you would your wedding night.

In the belly of the cod

Among the reasons why I might be tempted to keep the cable teevee: the cool stuff that does occasionally turn up. For one thing, BBCAmerica is showing a David Bowie concert right now. He's still the nazz. Also, I saw some of The Iron Chef. Either the Japanese are one seriously fucked up people, or they are the coolest nation on the planet. Tonight's theme was cod. Or as the Iron Chef expressed it: "Caaaahhhhhddd!" One of the guest/contestant chefs was one of the Japanese royal family's chefs. The look on his face clearly said: "I went to Japanese haute cuisine school for this?" I had to change the channel, though, because eating leftover pizza does not mix well with the sight of some guy digging brain-colored roe out of a giant cod's guts.

Blogrollup

I have had to cut down on the number of blogs on my blogroll. If your blog has vanished from the list, it doesn't mean that I don't love you or anything like that. I just had to get rid of some of the sites that hadn't been updated in a while, or that for some reason or other I had stopped reading, or had linked to on a whim and become disinterested in -- or just plain had no time to read! This way maybe I won't be so intimidated into reading some of the remaining seldom-read (by me, anyway) blogs that are still on it. The roll had just become too huge for me to deal with.

TV Damnation

Among the reasons why I may not keep this free cable teevee, despite the wonders of good reception and being able to watch reruns of McMillan and Wife on the Hallmark channel is -- oh, well, just read this:

LOS ANGELES - Reality television has officially swallowed the United States whole. Three of the top four TV shows last week were American Idol, Survivor and American Idol again. Actors and writers walk around Hollywood with beaten looks on their faces, mumbling about the Good Old Days when the boob tube was filled with scripted programming performed by actual artists.

I saw a snippet of one of those shows -- I forget which one, they all run together in my mind until they form some Dante-esque vision of hell where there's a stage on an island lit only by huge tacky klieg lights and unpleasant hosts with snide British accents run around with pitchforks stabbing at unattractive half-naked ex-bar-hags who are too busy fighting over some dufous of a guy who is supposed to be a millionaire but is really a postal worker from Cleveland to notice. Unlike many other sad victims (some of whom openly admit, and even seem to celebrate, their addiction) I am unable to watch these shows because I never could enjoy pain. Watching "reality" teevee is like having the air sucked out of your head with a straw through the sinus cavity, or ten-thousand ice cream headaches all at once, or nails scraping along a blackboard amplified to ten thousand decibels. But, to each their own.

(PS: yes, I am tracking back to those persons' weblogs because I am evil.)

Bread and Nuances

Concerning the recent bombings in Morocco, I have been reading here and there (most recently in the comments to this post) some expressions of astonishment that Belgian interests were apparently among those targeted, since Belgium is currently pursuing efforts to set up some sort of international kangaroo court with which to try upstart Americans "war criminals" like General Franks. Of course this astonishment has a sarcastic edge; I don't think that many people, at least on the pro-war-against-terrorists side, are really surprised that Al Qaeda & Co. are not telegraphing their attacks according to who is currently attempting to appease them, or whatever it is the Belgian contingent thinks it is doing with its "antiwar" posturing. At the risk of repeating myself, these terrorists are Arab supremacists, and they care not a whit for the good opinions and peace offerings of Western infidels. If such antics momentarily give their cause a boost by diverting American/allied efforts against them they are fine with that, but it makes no difference to them in the long run, because as far as the terrorists are concerned we are all worm food. And they just might put their "appeasers" up against the wall first, just on general principles. No one, even evil sons of nazis, likes people who betray their own.

This isn't deep wisdom: I figured all that out about five minutes after the World Trade Center was attacked. I'm not going to make any claim to being a Big Brain either: I garnered my deep wisdom by sitting on my ass reading mostly junk like science fiction and fantasy, watching crap movies on tv, and occasionally talking to my fellow clueless humans. I am not particularly well-traveled: I've been to Europe exactly once, over twenty years ago. I learned that they sure do love soppy pop music there, and everything is uphill except in the Netherlands. I've been to college -- in the parlance, I have "some college" education. I may never finish, because there is one thing I now know and that is that you don't go to college to get educated. Maybe that is why all these eggheads with their PhDs in PoliSci and Sociology are so solid between the ears about this little Islamofascist problem: they actually thought they were learning something while they were being filled up with the latest kewl theories. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe all the terrorists want is a hug.

Return of the King

There are some new images available of the upcoming third part of Lord of the Rings. It's looking good so far.

There were also some other pictures up on this site earlier today, but they were removed at the request of the filmakers. The reason given is that they were of poor quality -- I can vouch for that, having seen them; for the most part they were dark, blurry, and barely recognizable to someone who hadn't already seen parts one and two of the trilogy.

The latest terrorist attack

It was in Morocco this time -- in Casablanca. That's ironic, in a way. I just happened to catch the story on CNN when I came in and turned the tv on. The Arabs are pissed -- at Al Qaeda & Co. The Islamofascisti continue to shoot off their own feet, dig their own grave, hoist themselves by their own petard, and so on.

Looking for Mr. Good-Baghdad

Speaking of hoaxes, there's a big Is He Or Isn't He argument going on about Salam Pax, that Where is Raed guy. Columnist David Warren is quite miffed about his assertion that Pax was really a Ba'athist spy. Even though I have had my own suspicions that Pax wasn't being 100% truthful with us (duh, ya think?), it seems to me that Warren is being a little over the top here.

There's a lot more informed opinion on this at Winds of Change. I'll just say that if he was a spy, what exactly was blogging supposed to accomplish? Disinformation? Well, I seriously doubt that the administration was using his blog as a major source of info about Baghdad. To foment antiwar sentiment? From what I have seen from commenters to his blog, and elsewhere, most peoples' war sentiment, whether pro- or anti-, was already set in cement, and those who admitted to being fence sitters changed their opinion one way or another for reasons other than sympathy for one blogger's personal plight.

In any case, to claim that all bloggers have swallowed his story hook, line, and sinker is something of a canard. Questions about the veracity of his blog are by no means a new phenomenon -- there have been other bloggers who opined last year that he might be a fake, long before any big pundit even knew his blog existed -- but now that the war is over (more or less) and Saddam is out of a job, presumably at one point or other we'll find out the truth.

(PS: I realize that Where is Raed is not just Salam Pax's blog, but I use "his" for purposes of brevity.)

Update: Lynn at Reflections in D Minor has some cogent observations too. (I linked, Lynn!)

Another escapee from Blogspot

Hey, everyone -- look who's moved. Go visit! (And now you can!)

Fox on the run?

Oh, what utter bullshit.

For one thing, guess who's involved. If that doesn't set off your alarm bells, then the mere fact that someone on the run from a family that "is an alarmingly influential pillar of a small European country, deeply meshed into the financial fabric of the nation and at the core characterized by the highest extremes of power and influence" is keeping a weblong with extensive entries should be a clue. Especially now that the site has been moved from the relative anonymity of Blogspot to its own domain. If her family is so much like the Corleones, isn't she afraid of endangering whoever registered the domain for her? I guess not -- but then she probably isn't even real. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if this isn't another of Mr. Plagiarist's performance-art-like stunts designed to mess with the blogworld's collective head.

As a side note, I can't understand the praise this writer, whoever it is, is getting from people. "She's a great writer" my ass. My cursory visits to her site to get an idea of what this was all about nearly caused me to go into a coma from boredom. If you have an old, dull, well-worn plot like "rich, powerful, and controlling family vs. frightened-yet-determined rebellious daughter" you sure had better have a writing style that raised your story above all the others mouldering in the remainders box with their front covers torn off. This girl (or whatever) doesn't -- she's so dull she makes me want to go to a used bookstore and dig up something by Barbara Cartland.

(Via Neal Sheeran.)

Who needs The Matrix?

This promotional free cable teevee I'm getting provides a bunch of Showtime channels. On something called Showtime Extreme they're showing some wack kungfu movie called Master of the Flying Guillotine. I turned the channel just as it was in the middle of some crazy flashback all in magenta. Some guy with one arm was chopping the heck out of some crazy old man with a braid. Then it goes into normal (pretty good for 1975 too) color. There's this scene in one of those kungfu schools with the one-armed guy telling all his students about said flashback. Then this weird horn music starts playing and they all turn to stare at this weirdo who comes in doing this weird Oriental dance and playing a horn. Then he starts some chopsocky free-for-all goodness. And oh my god, is the dubbing awful.

Now this "Indian" guy in a turban with an owl on his shoulder just set the hero's room on fire. Now they are chopping at each other. I really must get around to watching my (undubbed) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dvd one of these days.

Secret favorite song

I'm listening to one of the digital radio stations that cable teevee offers, the one that plays songs from the seventies. They started to play Bobby Goldsboro's "Summer (the First Time)." I hadn't heard that song in years. It was once my favorite song... it almost made up for "Honey." Almost.

What's your secret favorite song?

Feel the love!

I've got fans. Refresh for some of my best sayings. Couldn't have designed it better myself. (PS: I guess this was supposed to be some sort of insult, but I'm rather flattered instead. Sorry, guys.)

Update: bwahahahaha!

Bring back the blink tag!

I think this is the first time in internet history that a website has been criticized for not being flashy enough.

I can see clearly now

All this time I had Clear Type as part of XP and I didn't know it. Rock. (Thanks to Donald Sensing for the tip.)

Lush Life, Pt. 5681

I washed the dishes and put some coffee on and then put some water in the pot for pasta (I can't afford my weight-losing all-meat diet right now) and then went to sit down and blog and stuff. A little while later I decided to check on the water. It wasn't boiling. Of course, water boils a lot faster when the stove is turned on.

Blue Highway

Well, that was a fun evening. I start on my way home, only to realize my car is making that BBBBPPPPRRRRRAAPPPP noise and doing that lurching thing that means, oh joy, a front tire has gone flat. No big deal, I pulled into a street next to one of the auto dealerships I deal with at work and one of the salesmen there helped me change my tire. (Okay, all I did was stand around while he changed my tire.) Then I drove home on the pathetic little donut. I'm just glad I don't have to drive on I-4. This means I'll be looking forward to buying at least two tires this Friday -- it would be stupid to put a brand new tire next to an aged and probably about-to-go old tire. (Hey, it looked like they still had tread to me. So I didn't do the dime test. And in any case, it's useless -- they are doing so much construction in this area that there are screws and nails and other sharp things everywhere. You're doomed either way.)

Then I get home, and of course the cable is working. I guess the scales are balanced for now.

Well, hell

Cable teevee hell has already started. I turned it on only to see a message that my service had been turned off, to call the service. So I call. "Oh, they changed some software, call this number to have your box turned back on." So I did, and after twenty minutes of unsuccessful fiddling I have another appointment with a cable guy on Thursday. All hail technology! Frankly, I think it's a conspiracy to get me to wake up early.

Oh well, I still have my dvd player. By the way -- I just wanted to point this out: the opening words of The Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel is "the world is changing, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the air" etc., are actually in the book -- Treebeard says them to Pippin and Merry in The Two Towers. It strikes me as quite clever of the scriptwriter to choose those words to open the movie with. (With which to open the movie? Bah, you're not getting good grammar from me at this hour.)

Where is my mind?

Oh god, I just found myself thinking that Tiffany's* version of "I Think We're Alone Now" wasn't half bad. The chick still couldn't dance to save her life, though.

*I was also unaware that she still had a career. I pay no attention to these things, usually.

Eighties flashback continued

Geez. I had forgotten all about double-wrapped belts with studs, wearing suits with the jacket sleeves rolled up, singers with bleached ivory hair and black eyebrows, and androgynous guitarists who were nevertheless actually attractive instead of merely creepy.

On the latest terrorist fun and games

They were just yammering on CNN or something about the recent terrorist attacks in Riyadh. Jesus, who cares what the group that did it calls themselves? Let's just drop all this "was it Al Qaeda? Or some other (insert some Arabic phrase)?" nonsense and call them something generic, like "the usual bunch of cretins." And their motives are no big mystery; I am sure I know why the cretins blew up stuff in Saudi Arabia this time. They want to get rid of all the Westerners there, and then all the rest of the foreigners, Muslim though all those Indians and Indonesians and Malaysians might be. The Usual Bunch of Cretins are Arab supremacists just like the Nazis were "Aryan" supremacists. They are just another flavor of terror pie, like Bin Laden and his Taliban crew, and that joker we just kicked out of Iraq. It's all from the same shelf of fly-specked, half-baked goods.

Moore teevee

Wow, Michael Medved and that guy on MSNBC's Scarborough Country show really just slammed Michael Moore up against the wall. "Liar," Fraud," and so on. Cable teevee has gotten fun.

Of course, everything they are talking about has already been talked about in blogs. (The Minuteman mascot hullabaloo at UMass, Senator and ex-Kleagle Byrd's hypocritical huffing over the president's wearing "military" regalia when he flew on that fighter jet to the carrier, and so on.)

I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time

Well, I've got cable teevee (and a clear picture) for the first time since sometime in 2000, and I have no idea how much older celebs and music people and such have gotten in the past three years because right now I am watching VH1C, and they are playing old 80s videos. Right now they have the Kinks doing a live version of "You've Really Got Me Now," and they just finished playing the Cars "Just What I Needed." Aaagghh! The clueless limp-spaghetti-armed dancing! The in-between-fashion-movements look of everyone's hair and clothes (basically everyone looked as if their 70s Farrah Fawcett shags had grown out and they were making do with their over-laundered old disco clothes until someone thought up new ways for people to look)! The shine all over everything that was "different" from that washed-out matte look popular in the Seventies but was not yet Eighties glitter! And... everything was pink. Weird. Did I actually live through all that?

My only weakness is a listed crime

My only weakness, well never mind, never mind.

(Yes -- it's another episode of Name That Song!)

Anger is an energy

Oh dear. I have been reprimanded. (See the fifteenth comment down from Concerned Troll Reader Phillip Harrington.) I keep trying to remember to turn that frown upside down, but it's not easy, being that my heart is a lump of coal and all.

Cable teevee goodies

Well, the dealer cable guy was just here and he finished installing my new addiction one month of free cable. The first thing I find is an unexpected treat: a Simple Minds concert from 1995 on some channel called Trio. I'd only ever seen them live once, in 1985, when the success of that song from The Breakfast Club made it possible for their tour to make it all the way down to Miami. I've got to get my videotape machine hooked up to this teevee. (The machine is attached to the useless bedroom teevee, which is only set to get the first twenty-five channels or so.)

Note to the Metapop folks

Why the fuck would I want to "log in" to your service if by merely visiting your page without logging in I'm labelled an anonymous coward? Kiss my ass.

Oh -- and pale blue sucks much dee eye see kay. I preferred your original green background.

Warning signs

Kevin Parrott is pissed off at Blogger. If I were the Blogger people, I'd be hiding under my desks right now and sucking my thumbs. (I'd be plural too.) Aw heck, they have probably been doing that for weeks now.

Also: dig those crazy signs. I was going to make some in the neat sign-maker program (needs Acrobat Reader), but I couldn't think of anything neat to say.

(No, no permalinks, you can't connect to any permalinks in Blogspot blogs, what are you, crazy?)

Update: Kevin has Paypal and Amazon links up -- help a fellow blogger escape from the evil Blogspot dungeon.

British National IQ test

Hey, if you're British go here and test your IQ. I was going to but it asked me what part of the UK I was from and it didn't really seem right to pick a region despite all the British people that live in the Orlando area. Anyway, I'm sure that there is no test that can measure the hugeness of my IQ, but you mortal humans folks might want to try.

(Via the clinic.)

Of course I am

You are smart and sexy!


Which Ultimate Beautiful Woman are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Via Jet's Place.

Art heist

Now here's a good, old-fashioned act of art-thievery:

A work of art that has been described as "the Mona Lisa of sculptures" has been stolen from Vienna's art history museum.

The 16th Century solid gold sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini was worth at least 50m euros ($57m, £36m), museum director Wilfried Seipel said.

This is one of the art pieces I studied in at least two of my humanities courses last year. I'll bet you this is going straight to some rich oil sheik's or drug-dealer's vault -- it's the sort of ostentatious gold stuff guys like that dote on.

The alarm sensors in the museum didn't go off. Can you say, "inside job"? I knew you could.

(Via Tim Blair, tomorrow.)

Anti-gun, man

Actually, if I were planning on going on a killing spree, I certainly would be against gun violence -- against myself, anyway. After all, getting shot in self-defense would certainly put a crimp in my plans to shoot a bunch of other people. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy, via Instapundit.)

Oversexed and over there

David Frum praises the unrestrained, sexy, British -- or does he?? (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

(Via a commenter in this post on Joshua Claybourn's blog.)

Dammit, people

My blog, my rules. My blog, my rules. MY BLOG, MY GODDAMN RULES. Why can't you understand that?

Here, I'll try to make it easy for you. In your house, say you don't want anyone to smoke. You tell people: "I'm sorry, no smoking inside." The people don't like it? Tough shizzle. Friends don't treat friends like doormats -- and strangers don't treat strangers whose homes they have been invited into like ashtrays. One does, of course, make certain accomodations for people -- one does not hang visitors from meathooks or make them sing the theme from "Annie" while letting one's dog hump their leg, but otherwise it's the duty of the guest to behave. And if the guest ceases to behave the guest deserves to get his ass handed to him in a sack.

Here are some things I don't want to see on my blog. Their appearance will get your ass handed to you in a small paper sack:

1. Any more comments referencing, favorably or unfavorably, the Country-Pop Trio Who Shall Not Be Named.
2. Any reference to the 2000 "stolen" election. The last time I checked my calendar we were halfway through 2003. I am not responsible for your psychological inability to accept the passage of time.
3. Any reference to anything the US does as being "all about the OIIILLLL." That includes saying, "But it is all about the oil --" and then listing umpteen thousand reasons to support your claim. Been there, done that, I'm over it.
4. Any reference to how we "had no right to interfere" in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the hell. It's not only a little too late to piss and moan about that now; but I will simply redirect you to this article until you either get it or get tired.
5. If, after reading the above article, you comment that the US "didn't really care about the Iraqi people, that wasn't the real reason for the invasion" yadda yadda, my reply to you will be: "Neither did you nor anyone else." Please note also that the shelf life of that argument is well past its expiration date.
6. Comments telling me that I am "vicious," "mean," or that I should be "nicer" in order to "persuade" people to come across to my point of view. I am not interested in "persuading" anybody of anything. I use this blog to express my opinions on things, and if others are entertained, that is fine with me. If somehow some rant of mine causes someone to rethink a position of theirs, that's nice, but I am not responsible for how others conduct their own thought processes. I am also not particularly interested in "being nice." I already have friends. They know what I am like.
7. People who ask snippily: "So what do you have a blog for anyway if it isn't to communicate?" Please see above, and remind yourself that "communication" doesn't always end happily. Consider it a life lesson.
8. And last (for now): any "helpful" comments suggesting I am getting "too upset" over something -- trolls, politics, the weather -- even from people I like, will get an eyebrow-singeing reply from me. I really am not interested in changing the name of my blog even though it is obvious that it is not enough that my domain is called "Spleenville" to get across to people the sort of stuff they are likely to find herein.

There. I hope this was an aid to all visitors and potential commenters.

Infidels, widows and humans, oh my!

At the trial of the Bali terrorists, the defendants claim that they were doing good, because

"Australians, Americans, whatever - they are all white people."

As well as being, of course, sinners and infidels. Well, that's par for the course among these Superior Third World™ Cultures that Have No Concept of Racism. White people (and sinners and infidels) aren't human anyway, so what do you expect?

But in this related article, we come to this little cultural tidbit:

"...Single mothers in Indonesia are unusual and these women say neighbours and friends have turned on them since their husbands died. They now live with relatives, or alone, surviving on handouts from welfare groups, or by part-time work in a co-operative formed three months ago by an Australian couple. Now they have been told the handouts will stop in three weeks.
Ratnitiasiah, 37, has had no income since the remains of her taxi driver husband, I Made Wijaya, were handed to her in three envelopes.

The mother of three ran a street food stall but was so shamed by gossipers who said she was having affairs with every man who stopped at her stall that she felt she had to close it.

She has been told to leave her rented home in a few weeks, but her landlord will not say why. She will have nowhere to live..."

They aren't even allowed to attend the trial of their husbands' killers.

That's right. Husbands. Excuse me, I am now going to take the kid gloves of sarcasm off.

To the neighbors of these women: you shits. You fucking pieces of flyblown excrement of dogs. No -- I take that back. I would like to apologize to dogs, flies, and excrement for associating something so low as you people with them. There is no word sufficient to describe the disgust I feel at the idea that there are people who would treat widows -- who were lawfully married by the tenets of your own customs, laws, and religion -- the way you are treating them. If you were on fire I wouldn't piss on you to put out the flames. I hope the terrorists get you next time. I hope your corpse-pieces get eaten by rats. No, that would poison the rats. You don't even deserve to get dissolved in an acid bath.

"Single mothers"? Screw these fucks and the asshole who decided to use that term instead of the proper term for a woman whose husband has been killed, which is WIDOW. And -- [ANN COULTER VOICE] take the rest of that island and totally Disney-Western-Sin-ify it. Cover it in Hiltons and Mickey-D's. Send Western tourists there by the boatload, until everyone man, woman, and child is fat, decadent, and rich. And hang all the terrorists and the widow-shunners in the public square. [/ANN COULTER VOICE]

I'm so sick of crap like this.

(Via The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.)

The Earth-shattering kaboom

Stupid trolls, why are you bothering me instead of discussing reasons why Star Trek sucks? Come on -- we can't all be suffering over the Fate of Man Person Bipedkind all day. Put down your Chomsky Bibles and peruse Happy Fun Pundit: Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek. You'll feel... cleansed.

Flies

Ah. I see what your pathetic little game is. Your drug-, booze, and cock-addled little brainettes have come up with the hilarious fun plan of "Let's see whose blogs we can harass into shutting down their comments sections and maybe even closing down entirely!" That game might work on some people, but not on me.

Come. I invite you. Post your comments. I think it's hilarious when the feeble-minded try to be witty and cruel when they don't even have the talent to be pathetic and stupid. It's lots more fun than bowhunting Helpless Thirdworld Children™. That was getting kind of boring.

PS: to everyone else, I really am beginning to think there is some sort of psychosis going around. For instance, I see that I am not the only one who is experiencing an upsurge in bizarre, random trollage from what seems to be members of some particularly distasteful cult. I only hope these cultees make like the followers of the late Reverend Jim Jones and guzzle the Koolaid soon, because they are using up valuable oxygen.

Update: they've made the mistake of bothering Acidman. Well, we have already established how stupid these trolls are.

Bad book alert

Wow. This really does sound like one of the worst books ever written.

Gluttons for punishment

Some people just like to be spanked. Here's a particularly sad case: someone calling itself "The Voice of Reason" (wow, that's so... original) left this in the comments to this post:

Hey Andrea, Why not save yourself some time and trouble by limiting your responses to either "I know you are, but what am I?", or "la, la, la - I have my hands over my eyes and can't see what you wrote."?

If, as you contend, you did not care what others think, you wouldn't spend some much time saying so.

You're a fucking psychopath, established beyond a doubt by your rules prohibiting the expression of anything you don't understand, or "trying out amateur psychology BS on me."

oops. bet I just got myself banned from the kingdom.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, you are, as of now, banned. I don't know why -- it must be because, fucking psychopath that I am, I object to some tiny-penised, shrunken gonad of a loser calling me "a fucking psychopath" in much the same manner as I would object to having shit smeared on my face. But I guess that puzzles hairy-palmed cellar-dwelling defectives like Voice, since they seem to spend so much of their time with their faces buried in feces.

All kidding aside, what I would like to know is -- who the fuck are you, and what is your problem with me? As far as I can recall, I have never encountered you before (unless you are a coward and are using a different name -- that would be typical) and if I did it wasn't memorable to me. I don't know you from Adam, nor do I want to; and I can only wonder at the emptiness of the life of someone who goes to a stranger's blog and shits all over it like you just did.

Anyway, thanks so much for your comments, Mr. or Ms. Voice at HEY SPAMBOTS, OVER HERE --> mjps85122@prodigy.net.

Oh yeah -- if you continue to harrass me, either by commenting from another IP or emailing me, then I will complain to your IP.

Update: One of Mr. or Ms. Voice's hose-babes, one "ally" whose email address (HEY SPAMBOTS -- HERE'S ANOTHER) is "feyfaer@yahoo.com" (oh give me a fucking break with these pathetic teens -- I'll bet this one has "radical" pink hair and a butterfly wing tatt on each ass-cheek) has weighed in with her deep wisdom. Thanks for the advice, porkmunch. Now get back to greasing your daddy's sausage, or he won't give you any more crack money.

Second update: kudos from Wogblog. Heh heh. (Search for "porkmunch.")

Blogs across the water

Here's a blog from Iceland. Icelandic is another of those languages I always wanted to learn in my ever-shrinking "spare time." (I always thought the word "blog" had a kind of Nordic sound to it, and I like the sound of those languages, which is probably why the word doesn't awaken feelings of loathing in me that it does in other people.)

Two things

One: It took nearly twenty minutes for this site to do a complete rebuild. I had the same problem last night.

Two: I've reset the size of the titles to each post. Now to figure out how I want the dates to look.

You can eat cake!

Oh -- wait. No you can't.

(Via Robyn.)

Mullah over this

Despite his reputation in certain quarters as some sort of rightwing ranter, Glenn Reynolds rarely seems to get really mad. Here's a rare example of anger from the Instapundit:

HERE'S THE LATEST on jailed Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. He's accused of selling "depraved" videos -- of weddings.

Note to Iranian mullahs: you're utterly pathetic. You are neither feared, nor respected for your piety. You're just a joke, in the eyes of the world and, these days, your own people.

Go to the link in the quote and you'll see his anger is more than justified. Stupid mullahs.

Politically Incorrect diseases

The phenomenon of Political Correctness has finally reached its nadir of idiocy: now even microbes are being subjected to its hair-splitting (cilia-splitting?) criteria. From an article on the curious fact that all the lookalike "SARS week" magazine covers of the major newsmagazines used Caucasian models for a disease that originated in and has so far mostly affected an Asian country, is this quote:

Jim Kelly, the managing editor of Time, explained his thinking about cover girls as follows: "It was a very conscious decision on our part to pick a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who looked like she got off the beach at Laguna. We wanted to go with a Western woman because we felt the disease was stigmatizing Asians unfairly."

At last, something about SARS that the hordes of PC can safely hate and fear: it's not just a disease that kills humans, it's a racist disease.

(Via alert reader Darth Monkeybone, who emailed me the article.)

New site look

Right now I've set the site up using this template from Empty Pages. I'll be fiddling with it, but I think that I have at last broken free of divs. Now to test in other browsers...

Okay, it works in Mozilla and Opera 7. By the way, text is resizable.

The time of the manuscripts

Years of Pain, And the Words To Describe It -- Hidden Writings Portray Life as Enemy of Hussein:

But now Hussein was gone and Samarrai's manuscripts were in full view. They spilled from manila folders piled high on wooden shelves where space had been cleared for their welcome. When Basra fell to British forces on April 7, Samarrai felt safe enough to thumb through an entire work without fear. When the Baghdad government collapsed two days later, he saw what looked like deliverance and reunited his works in plain sight.

(Via Random Jottings.)

Rock star

Ken Layne: rock star. Now we can all say we knew him when...

Livin' in the Eighties

Perfect morning get-moving song: Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." Don't let the elevator break you down.

Too tired to blog

Nighty-nite. Don't let the trolls bite.

(Click this)

Pour some sugar on me

I got a call the other day and it was a saleslady from Brighthouse, which used to be Time-Warner Cable. Brighthouse has been having a promo. After I hung up I not only had one free month on my Earthlink account, I had one free month of cable teevee. The cable guy is coming Monday. Now, I know I am always saying I hate teevee, but heck, this is free. And besides, I am getting it just in time to enjoy the return of Headbanger's Ball.

Come on now, everybody sing! "I'm hot/sticky sweet/from my head/to my feet..."

(Via A Small Victory.)

They do it over there but we don't do it here

Um -- I think that these clothing designs are missing something. Like... clothes.

(Via Tim Blair, who only reads FHM for the articles.)

[Bonus quiz: where did I get the title from?]

The open road

Words to live by:

Take a drive cross country. Leave the "fly-over" mentality at home where it belongs and savor this country from the road. It's an incredibly diverse and vast stretch of land with characteristics you don't get to see from sitting in your living room watching The Travel Channel. Stop at the historical markers, the monuments and the sights. Read about what happened before you got there. Get off the interstate and see what's happening in the rest of America. And just drive. After a while, it will dawn on you that we're all pretty fortunate to have ended up here in this land. Free to move about. Free to drink it all in. Free to roam around on our own. Free to just be. And you'll be thankful that somehow, someway, we've managed to keep it together here as a nation for over 225 years. Do it when you're young. And then do it again later. It never gets old.

(Via Dustbury.)

00:14:58

The White Stripes backlash has begun!

(PS: I like the White Stripes and PJ Harvey. Can't we all just get along?)

Spiceless vices

Everyone's making a big fuss about William Bennett's gambling thing. Yawn. Bennett has always bored me. His Book of Virtues was incredibly dull, and was probably really written to punish children into behaving. ("Keep acting up, Suzy, and I'll read to you from Mr. Bennett's book!" "No, Mommy, no -- I'll be good!") And yes, I have tried to read it.

Well, as is typical, even when Bennett turns out to have a rather large and embarassing vice, it's also an incredibly dull one: gambling. I have never understood the appeal of gambling. My friends taught me to play poker, and that was fun, but we played for chips -- the fun would have drained right out of the game for me if money was involved. I can't see the appeal, at all. I have read it is the thrill of possibly "winning big," the adrenaline rush, the -- excuse me, you are standing in a smoky room staring at a ball spin around, or throwing little plastic cubes about. And you aren't James Bond with a blond hanging onto your arm and an assassin about to shoot you through your tie-pin.

And wouldn't you know -- even Bennett's preferred facet of the vice is the most boring of all. Video poker? One of those machines with the spinny, flashing light things that you just sit there and poke coins into? Ken Layne is wrong -- it's not masturbation, because at least when you're masturbating you're doing something. "Playing" video poker is like to gambling as being awake is to catatonia.

Irritation threshold reached

An announcement: from now on I will be deleting any comment that mentions the Dixie Chicks. I am so sick of those boring women, the Wilson-Phillips of the country scene. From now on this is a Dixie Chicks-free blog.

And I don't care who you are or what your subject is. Pick another entertainer/set thereof to use to illustrate your point. I do mean this.

PS: the comment that inspired this has been deleted. I do have it saved elsewhere (not on my server space) and I emailed the commenter's words to him so he would not have his First Amendment Rights to be a smug asshole breached by a fascist nazi bitch like me. I would never want to abridge anyone's rights to spread their smarm all over someone else's web space. 'Cos that's what my comments section is for, right? It's like a toilet that all of humanity can use and they don't even have to flush or clean up.

Architects of castles in the air

Michael J. Totten writes on the difference between conservatives and liberals. Fine article, many truths, yadda yadda. There's just one problem: his concept of liberals as "builders" vs. conservatives as "preservers."

I don't have a problem with the latter: I also have this idea of the stereotypical conservative as being rather like the Old Took holed up in his increasingly shabby hobbit hole, "...a huge place, where the furniture has never been moved or changed for generations."¹ But the idea of liberals as "builders" makes me want to laugh. Most liberals, or the people calling themselves such, certainly like to think of themselves as builders (they'd probably say "architects of the future" or something grand-sounding like that). But they are builders in the way my dad was handy around the house.

I will illustrate: we lived in an old (for Miami) house that my father was always tinkering with, "fixing" stuff. That was why the place I grew up in was always falling apart -- that and the termites. One day they decided to turn our little-used dining room into a bedroom for me. I wanted bookshelves, so my father bought some planks and nailed them to the wall. There was no fitting, no brackets, none of that stuff. After a few years, I was propping up the lower shelves with old encyclopedias, and every once in a while I had to hammer some of the shelves back in place. They sagged in the middle (where I had run out of old encyclopedias). And so on.

What liberals are is a high-caste version of the "idea man" of Madison Avenue fame. They sit around in taverns and classrooms making up grand schemes to improve the world, plans that work out great on paper but are easily defeated by the real world much as my bookshelves were defeated by gravity.

In the meantime, while the liberals are fucking up in grand style and the conservatives (like me) are huddling behind their piles of moldy books containing millions of facts that liberals are too busy to deal with, the bulk of humanity that is neither one nor the other -- the ordinary folk that all the liberals are so busy trying to "help" and all the conservatives are eyeing with suspicion -- are actually doing the stuff that needs to be done. Neither ideological group likes the ordinary people very much, because they aren't really interested in the Important Things, like politics and ideology and arguing over same. (I think this is why many conservatives, and most liberals, hate George W. Bush. He's one of the ordinary, not-interested-in-your-philosophy, do-stuff people who somehow made good and got put in charge. That's not supposed to happen.)

1. The Two Towers.

Drabble Babble

Well here's another bigdeal literary fiction writer (aka "crashing dull read") whose works I'll be avoiding... the way I have always avoided them. You know, maybe she just needs to see a gastroenterologist -- and a psychiatrist.

(Via Instapundit.)

I have to say it

"Never trust an elf!"

Oh come on. Like I'm the only one.

Who eats dead vultures?

Obviously, we made a huge mistake in not letting this war in Iraq drag on and on while the bodies piled up. Why? Because we left little or nothing for carrion birds to eat. And that is why, I think, so many carrion birds of the left have been trolling the blogs; there is no smelly corpse to feast upon, so they are forced to attempt to get nourishment from healthy beasts well able to defend themselves. Case in point: a conspiracy-obsessed troll who calls himself "Barney Gumble" has graced my blog with his presence, after attacking, and being easily driven from, the comments pages of Sgt. Stryker, Denny Wilson, and Bill Quick's blogs. This is the sort of person whose favorite type of comeback to someone who has proven one of his dumb comments wrong, is to say "Ha ha! You so did not beat me! I win because I say I win! You can't handle me!" And so on. I have met five year olds with more control over a situation than Mr. "Gumble."

His comment in my post was, I guess, supposed to send me into a frothing rage that he could enjoy in a way that is no doubt keeping the manufacturers of keyboard-protectors, Windex, and Kleenex profitable. I am sorry to inform him that he has failed: I regard the sad spectacle of someone who says "[...] you better ban me now, because I believe that Bill Clinton was a good man and a good President" more with amusement than anything. That's nice, Barney. You go ahead and admire anyone you want. Momma will be down later with some cookies and milk for her boy.

I am not going to bother banning you for such a pitifully innocuous comment. I'll just see if you are man enough to keep your own word:

Barney Gumble, go away.
Barney Gumble, go away.
Barney Gumble, go away.

Shout out

Look who's back posting (well, more or less).

Via On the Third Hand.

Oh look, it's a group effort

The title of this jerk's site says it all: "blee bloo blar BLOG -- FAT. HAIRY. GAY. ATHEIST. RADIOACTIVE. LIBERAL. WHINER."

No shit.

He and his list of little friends are the source of this morning's drive-by feces-flinging match.

How to get banned

You know what will get you banned?

1. Talking about me over my head in my own blog.
2. Trying out amateur psychology BS on me.

Congratulations, John Kusch at IP address 69.11.140.17, you've been banned! For your remarks in this post. To recap: some little snoot named Adam dropped his pearls of wisdom in the comments, which I mocked, because they were both dull and tired. Then along came Phil, who told me I was rude. (Gee, Phil, did you ever wonder why this site is called "Spleenville," Not "Inn of the Fourth Happiness-Ville," or "Fluffy Bunnyville"? LIKE THE FAQ SAYS, if you want your ego massaged, go elsewhere.) Then along comes this John creature, whose remarks I will reproduce here for your pleasure:

Being wrong is okay. Lots of people make mistakes. Without making mistakes, people can't learn. It's a process. But when you know you're wrong, and you keep at it, that's cause for concern.

The phrase "same old lines of tired bullshit" is essentially meaningless. Adam didn't even really make an argument -- he merely stated that Natalie Maines had a political opinion, and that her opinion is shared by many Americans. He wasn't saying that we're a big powerful mob (though pro-war people often use that very argument), or that pro-war people better watch out, or really anything like that. I'd say Andrea's projecting a bit, not to mention that her jingoistic phrasing labels her far more of a sycophant than Adam, who seems to be a relatively thoughtful person.

It's so ironic that pro-war people -- people who support attack -- so often see themselves as under attack, even while they're attacking anti-war people. This phenomenon has been well-documented in psychology: we tend to see in others those things we're most guilty of ourselves.

Love the line about me being a sycophant. To whom? Myself? Dubya? -- oh that must be it. I can't wait for some other puppy to jump in here and accuse me of being one of Dubya's drones. Boring. Why are you antiwar people -- or "thoughtful," "neutral" people, or whatever you are calling yourselves -- so goddamned boring? I refuse to get into boring, pointless discussions with boring, pointless people.

Word of advice

Don't EVER come onto my blog and tell me that I am not being "nice," or that I was mean to someone who was "polite" by someone else's definition of "polite," or in any way tell me how to behave. I decide how I behave on my own GODDAMN BLOG. I pay for the server space here. If anyone who donated money now or in the past is displeased with my behavior, I will gladly refund the cash to you, but otherwise SHUT UP.

Oh -- and READ THE GODDAMN FAQ -- THIS IS WHY I WROTE IT.

Oh -- and if anyone leaves any more quotes about the Dixie Chicks and how they have "honest opinions that lots of people share" and then uses that fat gasbag fake-umentary maker Michael Moore's works as examples to prove their point, that post will be deleted and the poster banned. Got it? Don't even waste your time here.

Celebrity (almost)-free

Dave commented on this post and I was going to put this reply in his blog, but I thought it was too huge and taking over his comments section, so I'll put it here.

Dave got kind of complicated about how perceptions of artists' works change when fans hear them say things that are offensive, and should we let that happen, and so on. I don't think it's that complex a problem, really, or at least I don't believe in being complicated about it and agonizing over it. I'm through agonizing over these people. (That is my way of dealing with it. I was not writing my post in the idea that everyone should do as I do.) For one thing, I don't believe in "boycotts" per se. I prefer to take it on a case-by-case basis, because, well, it's my money and my time. For instance, Viggo Mortenson's spouting off really annoyed me, not because he criticised the president or the war or thinks different than I do, but because what he had to say was so dumb and juvenile. But I'm still going to buy the Two Towers dvd, I'm still going to see Return of the King. And if he appears in another movie that looks good I'll see it sometime like as not. (Note: it has to fit into my rather narrow criteria of movies that I like.) I simply refuse to read any of his interviews, buy any of his "poetry" books (ugh), and so on. As for the Dixie Chicks, I have no interest in their music, but that has always been the case. I am actually getting sick of them -- their reputation has outpaced their rather feeble talent, and as for their talents as provacateuses, they disappoint, to say the least. I was merely pissed that they trash-talked the leader of their country to a bunch of foreigners; I was brought up to believe that one simply doesn't air one's dirty laundry (if one thinks it's dirty) to strangers like that. Sue me, I think my mama brought me up right. But I don't care if people buy their records and go see them; they can keep on having a nice, successful career.

What bothers me is not the anti-Bushisms and even anti-Americanisms (or stuff that can be taken that way) that the celebrities spout, it is the stupidity of what they have to say. It's barely above "Bush eats worms!" playskool taunts. It pains me to see people reveal their stupidity while their minders nod and pat their charges' heads and count the money. I get tired of having to tell myself that contrary to appearances, members of the entertainment industry are not any more jacked into what's going on in the world than the average 7-11 clerk in Podunkville, Nowhere -- often much less so. It's a mistake to think that just because someone is wildly talented in one area, or even two or three, that they are intellectual giants as well.

But that having been said, for the most part, my restaurant analogy still stands for me. I prefer not to be insulted -- to have my intelligence insulted by someone who is my intellectual inferior in everything but musical or acting ability, merely because they have fame and money and have access to millions of sycophantic fans and have "important" media people hanging on their every word and I don't. I don't need my entertainment that badly. If I happen to hear something an artist says that colors my perception of his work badly enough so that I can no longer enjoy it, too bad for me, but I think it's even worse for the artist. How sad is that, to lose a fan over something stupid you said? I'm not going to make an effort to jump the hurdles these idiots place in front of my enjoyment of their work anymore if I don't feel like it. Why should I? I have a life. For example: so Jessica Lange thinks she can keep my eyes on her after switching her heinie across the pond and telling the Euros how she's "ashamed to be American"? Screw you, Jessie, and thanks for the "honest opinion." Hope you like your new European fans, you've lost at least one American. And so on.

Pay for the funny man

Have you given to Treacher today? I did.

So what did they want him to wear, a tuxedo?

Read Dan from Happy Fun Pundit on the reasons why it was good that the president flew the plane, and then shut up. Please. (Though far be it from me to abridge your free speech rights -- go right ahead and keep on talking about how a dangerous stunt like that was merely a cynical campaign photo op, or that he was all "Third World Massa" acting, or whatever your damage is. Just so long as you don't mind sounding stupid.)

I really am getting sick of some things.

Postage block

I keep starting posts and cancelling them. Sorry guys.

A piece of...

I hate it when the underwear rides up my ass like that. Don't you? (Via Tim Blair, who only subscribes to Maxim for the interviews.)

Since it's my blog

I think I can say: don't bore me.

Radio Haha

Oh, this is funny -- just now I'm listening to this techno station on Winamp (this one, if you want to listen) and a canned announcer's voice comes on, and says, something about internet radio being "the real reason the internet was created. Just ask Al Gore!" Oh, that is funny on so many levels.

A/C on

Thanks!

(Clicky-clicky)

Chomp... chew... crunch... gulp

I love the smell of napalm in my comments. It smells like... victory.

France and the EU

The French have been naughty. Yes, I know -- die of shock. The continuing revelations that the French have been Saddam Hussein's bagmen is not surprising. But it seems as if they are even screwing over their EU buddies. More and more, France's obsession with this European Union thing is beginning to look like that of a woman who really, really wants to get married but just can't seem to stop cheating on her fiancé.

Loss of Appetite

Evan Coyne Maloney kinda sorta isn't going to boycott entertainers who insult the audience a la the Dixie Chicks, though he does point out that we the audience are their employers and that they the entertainers should not forget that. He says:

Focus on the fruits of their creativity; pay no mind to their sour grapes ideology. It's not worth the energy.

That's all well and good, but to stretch his opening analogy of the rude chef a little further, if the chef came out and called me names and told me he considered the money I was going to pay for the meal to be coming from bloodstained hands, I would pay for the meal, but I doubt I'd eat another bite of it. And I would not go to that restaurant again, not if it were the only one in town. I find as I grow older I have less and less time to give to people who insult me for not thinking the way they do. Life is too short. I can cook my own meals and entertain myself.

(Via Instapundit.)

Message to Texas people in the Austin area

And any others not in Texas too -- Scott Chaffin helped me, now you guys can help him help someone else much more deserving, and have a good time doing it. Wish I were there...

Little Miss F**k-Up Update

First off, I'd like to thank all you guys who sent me money -- you all rock! The Keep Andrea's A/C On project is underway. (I have until midnight tomorrow to pay up, so hopefully the Paypal-to-slowass-bank transactions will have been completed by that time. If not... well, there may be light posting here for a day or two.) Also, I have finally got around to opening an Ebay account, and will get around to opening a seller's account, so I can sell some of my detritus. (Like those two Thomspon Twins albums I bought and played exactly once.)

By the way, either I have a fever, got overheated from spending exactly five minutes out in the heat -- the time it took to go from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned house and so on -- or I am suffering through my first hot flash. Not pleasant. I am thinking of filling the tub up with ice cubes and climbing in.

I will also be working full-time for a couple of weeks while the boss is away on a trip. That's more money for me, though possibly less posty goodness for you, at least during the day. (It quiets down after five, and I work until 8pm.)

I have also scrounged up my old Photoshop install files, and found where I had put the registration number, so I am once more Photoshop-empowered. Stay tuned for site changes and other ephemera.

PS: forgot to add -- I have been listening to techno music lately on the Winamp radio and I think I know why this "dance" genre is so popular among geekheads. It's not because it's dance music -- it's because the rhythm is great to type to. I swear my words-per-minute count has gone up in the past couple of days.

Baghdad's missing treasures: the saga continues

According to this article in the Chicago Tribune,* most of the missing artifacts have been found -- inside the museum:

A total of 38 pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.

That's a different number than the 27 to 29 I've been reading elsewhere, but it is still a much lower number than 170,000.

The inventory, compiled by a military and civilian team headed by Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, rejects reports that Iraq's renowned treasures of civilization--up to 170,000 artifacts--had been lost during the U.S.-led war against Iraq. It also raises questions about why any of the artifacts were reported missing.

Of course, this is the US military -- I can hear the objections now: "Of course they'd say that and whitewash themselves!" It is taken for granted by certain persons that the US military 1) habitually lies, even about non-strategic matters like missing museum stuff, and 2) that they do so despite the fact that their every move in Iraq is now under a magnifying glass. Hey, it could happen -- but I prefer to believe that these investigators are telling the truth, despite their being members of the Evil Hegemonical American Military-Industrial Cabal.

Damage to the museum's administrative offices was extensive, with desks, wiring, fixtures and chairs hauled out by looters. Artifacts, apparently obscured in some instances by the rubble left by looters, emerged largely unscathed.

I told you, Office Depot or some place like that will make a killing if they open up in Baghdad. The Iraqis seem to be much more interested in getting their hands on office furniture than on clay tablets.

This will make people happy -- I hope:

The most significant of the damaged pieces was the Golden Harp of Ur. But investigators determined that the golden head on the damaged antiquity, feared missing, was only a copy. Museum officials confirmed this week to investigators that the original head had been placed in a storage vault at the Iraqi Central Bank before the war.

That would be the much-lamented "Harp of Pu-Abi." So no unscrupulous artifact-collecting millionaire is attempting to play "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" on it, that's good to know.

Cronaca is skeptical about the low missing artifact count, because, he says:

The fact is, recording and publishing objects receives low priority in any museum; money is always short, and it inevitably goes first to acquisition, preservation, and display. Few museums in the entire world have a significant portion of their records digitized, facilitating off-site backup. Museums in poor but archeologically rich locations often have skimpy records indeed -- all on paper, often without photographs, with the most minimal of descriptions.

Well yeah, but that sounds like a great opportunity for fraud and misdirection too. If, say, the "170,000" number was merely an estimate of everything in the museum, including boxed-up envelopes full of beads, shards, and other "less-valuable" (per the Tribune article) items, and there had been shoddy record-keeping to begin with, then one could sneak out a fair-to-middling artifact here, a less valuable one there, and even some of the showier pieces, and then during this oh-so-convenient looting (which included mysterious openings -- not break-ins -- of vaults that no one seems to have the key for; see the Tribune article for details) that happened during this oh-so-convenient war that had been publicly on the board for a year and a half.

But in any case, this probably won't make any difference in certain quarters. I am still of the opinion, as is John Dunshee (the post from which the link to the Tribune story was taken is that of May 5th, 1:07pm) that no matter how good the news is that comes out of this event, it won't matter, because the idea that "Americans allowed the looting" has already become the established truth. No one will care about the real truth. I can't wait for Oliver Stone's version of the fall of Baghdad -- it will purport to be "Finally! The Truth!" and be nothing more than a rehash of all the old, tired lies and canards, like his Kennedy movie.

*Registration-only, but I believe registration is free.

You need to read this

Now. (If the link goes to that stupid blue "we can't find that site" page, copy and paste the URL into your browser window and take out all of this text: 2003_05_04_junkyardblog_archive.html.)

Why, God, Why?

They are making Grease 3. That's right, a sequel to the abysmal Grease 2, which was a sequel to the horrible Grease. Some history: Grease is one of my sister's favorite movies. (The Brooke Shields softcore porn vehicle Blue Lagoon is another.) Thank god we didn't have a videotape machine when we still lived in the same house, or she would have tormented me with 24/7 replays of both.

(Via Amish Tech Support.)

LOTR cast interview bit

I got a laugh out of this snippet of this report on an appearance by some members of the cast of Lord of the Rings:

The panel were asked what was the most stupid question they'd ever been asked. Billy Boyd talked about being at a press junket and being asked what part he played in the movie and he said "Pippin" to which the interviewer replied "Oh! Will you be playing him in the second movie too?" to which he replied "No. I've got to do Frodo in the second movie". Andy had been asked at the press junket for The Two Towers if he'd had to go to New Zealand to make the movie. John's favourite was at the Cannes Film Festival where actors were put in groups and he was with Viggo and Sean Bean. "The female French interviewer had looked at Viggo and said 'Well I am a woman and there's not much for me in this film' and gave a small sigh. And then she looked at John and did the same thing. And then she saw Sean and suddenly became more lively. 'Ah!' she said, 'Sean, tell me as a woman how would you seduce me?'. I've never seen Sean so embarrassed and of course Viggo and I were going 'Yes, Sean! Go on! How would you...?'.

Heh heh -- insert joke about dumb reporters (and oversexed French female reporters) here. ("John" is John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli; "Andy" is Andy Serkis, a.k.a. "Gollum." Y'all know who Viggo is.)

Why you shouldn't mess with me

Skadi is the Goddess of Winter and of the Hunt. She is married to Njord, the gloomy Sea God, noted for his beautiful bare feet (which is how Skadi came to choose him for her mate.) Supposedly the bare foot is an ancient Norse symbol of fertility. The marriage wasn't too happy, though, because she really wanted Baldur for her husband. She is the goddess of Justice, Vengeance, and Righteous Anger, and is the deity who delivers the sentence upon Loki to be bound underground with a serpent dripping poison upon his face in payment for his crimes. Skadi's character is represented in two of Hans Christian Anderson's tales: "The Snow Queen" and "The Ice Princess."


What Norse God Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Via Mixolydian Mode. Note: I didn't like the image the quiz maker used -- it was just too feckin' bizarre -- so I stole a more appropriate image from this website.)

Media Bores

Am I the only one who is not obsessed with this poor dead woman? I have noticed one thing about people who go on and on about the horror of media circuses such as this and how they compromise our justice system: they are, nevertheless, still watching.

I mean, hey, it's a Free Country®, do whatever the hell you want. But I'd like to go on the record as saying 1) I did not watch the obsessive OJ trial coverage (I couldn't escape seeing it in friend's houses or hearing the talk about it at work, but that was out of my control); 2) I never watched any of the Clinton/Monica crap; 3) I avoided the Elian scandals, the Leona Helmsley foofaraws, and the 2000 Election Debacle®. I long for the days when they forbade cameras in the courtroom. Cameras are no better at "revealing the truth" (something we all learned after the Rodney King fiasco, which I also didn't watch) than the sketches of the courtroom artists who found themselves out of a job the minute teevee took over.

This country was supposed to be a representative democracy. Our elected officials are supposed to be the ones to deal with all the messy details of herding this giant army of cats we call America. We the people tell our representatives what we want, our representatives are thus kept busy trying to juggle these often-contradictory desires, and eventually make compromises that make the least amount of people unhappy. But I am seeing a shift towards a messier, less-workable sort of "democracy" -- one which can slide into "mob rule" at the drop of a hat. This is my roundabout way of saying that I agree with Talkleft's premise that the blabbing going on and on about this Peterson dude is just not right.

I wish we'd go back to the days of no cameras in the courtroom -- at the very least, it would provide jobs for starving artists again. It would also lend some dignity and distance from the smelly crowd to a justice system that desperately needs it. What can I say, I was raised on Perry Mason. But that's not going to happen -- there are still too many people that think that being on teevee is the be-all and end-all of existence.

Anyway, my media blackout continues. How so many other people can stand the kindergarten level of discourse served up to them from the other glowing box I will never get. I never could stand being talked down to myself.

Dixie Cups

This is the best we could muster?

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A lone protester stood outside a sold-out Dixie Chicks concert Saturday night during the band's first appearance in Florida since a member criticized President Bush over the war with Iraq.

And typically, he wasn't even from Florida:

But Texas-native Thomas Newton stood at an intersection near the TD Waterhouse Centre wearing a cowboy outfit and holding a sign that read: "I Am Ashamed The Dixie Chicks Are From Texas."

This town is too god-damn transient. In a way, that's a good thing, because it keeps the Hippie-American population down. Oh well.

(Via Damien Penny, today.)

Nice Kitty

Take the "Which FARK Cliche Are You" quiz!

Bad Girl

take the virgin-whore dichotomy quiz.


and go to mewing.net. where we're all studs.

Jeez. Just because I like to wear black a lot. And carry a whip. Is that so bad?

(Via redsugar muse.)

Bombs hideaway

I was thinking about WMDs (no -- really!) and then this post at Mr. Helpful's blog caused some of the random thoughts I had coalesce into something more or less coherent, considering my lack of expertise in this area and in all areas military, strategic, and political. Well, I guess that is why he is Mr. Helpful.

Like many people, Mr. Helpful is antsy about the US finding the big bombs and stuff. But -- I am not going to go on here about the size of the country and so forth -- it has been done to death. On the other hand, I think a lot of people are losing sight of the fact that this war was touted as a "pre-emptive" war. In fact, that was one of the real big bitches against it. "'Pre-emptive'!" a lot of critics shrieked. "Who does Dubya think he is -- God? Our parents?" That second criteria being even more evil than the first. But I am getting off the track here.

The idea that we were invading Iraq to prevent Saddam from developing/assembling an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that he was specifically directed not to do by the sacred overlords of the United Nations (whom everyone pays lipservice to but no one obeys) was one of the criticisms against the war -- the idea that it was presumptuous, that we had no right, and so on. I am not going to go into the social ramifications of that attitude tonight. I am going to address the idea that the critics (I'd call them the antiwar contingent, but they are not all of that, nor are they wholly of the left) have now dropped that idea -- a sensible tactic, since the invasion is now a moot point -- and are now into the idea that we must now find WMDs inside Iraq to justify the war. I have actually even seen it postulated (see the comments) that the lack of such WMDs are grounds of impeachment of President Bush. Of course that idea is laughable on its face.

But to find WMDs -- there is the rub. Where are we to begin? Hussein had a whole country, of some size, to play with, for at least a dozen years. In Mr. Helpful's comments I said (in some less detail) that if I were an Evil Overlord like Saddam Hussein, and my most hated enemy was simultaneously massing armed forces off my borders while talking the aggressive talk to the world concerning moi (l'état, c'est moi), and had I already had assembled at least a small arsenal -- even one nuclear warhead -- of WMDs, I would not have pussyfooted around and waited and played with Hans Blix's head the way he did. Rather, I would have wasted no time in launching a warhead containing some deadly agent -- plutonium, smallpox, poisonous gas, whatever -- at some nearby place; Kuwait, most likely. (And before any of you even think of dragging out that old dead horse about Arab solidarity or any such nonsense please remember that Saddam Hussein has shown no more compassion or caring for his fellow actual Arab brother than he has for the Kurdish women and children he had gassed just so he could make sure his human spray killed people dead like the label said. He was in all ways a traditional Arab chieftain -- a thug to whom his underlings were no more than cannon fodder when the chips were down, up, or in a drawer.)

If I were an Evil Overlord like Saddam, I'd have nuked Kuwait City the moment I heard the war talk start. Saddam was delusional and evil, but he wasn't entirely stupid. He knew as well as I, a part-time auto insurance agent, that once you showed the world that you have the Bomb, you were guaranteed the kid glove treatment for life. Look at North Korea.

So no, I don't think we are going to find any WMDs. I think that we are going to find parts of WMDs. I think that we are going to find a stash of cesium some-number here, a crate of vials of anthrax there. I think we are going to find "baby milk" factories with warehouses full of mysterious metal tubes that are rather larger than even elephant baby bottles; I think that we are going to find caves with partly assembled rocket launchers that were only missing the pertinent part to be completed. And that is going to be only the tip of the iceberg. And we will find that certain countries (whose names begin with F, G, and R) were in it up to their elbows. In fact, I think that we have started to find these things out, but that they are being kept until a really devastating dossier of evidence has been developed. That seems to be the Dubya methodology.

I will say this. I think that the UN inspector shenanigans helped somewhat. I think that all that nonsense distracted Hussein enough, and scared enough potential sellers of deadly shtuff, that he was prevented from realizing his wet dream of building a nuclear weapon. (I think he fell back on poison gas as a sloppy second, but the big bangflash nukes were his one true desire.) So I think they were useful idiots in this endeavor. Or were they? Sometimes I wonder if UN incompetence and intransigence is entirely the truth of the matter. Maybe all of this -- the posturing of Chirac, the UN's maneuverings, the blatherings of Schroeder (anyone else have visions of some short blond kid at the piano every time his name is mentioned?), the treachery and the buffoonery -- was all an elaborate ruse, a ruse pulled on Saddam Hussein. Then again, I am not so sure pols are that smart -- my intellectual (now there's a word I'd like to steal back, if I wasn't so sure it wasn't as gutted as a Honda Prelude that's been in the chop shop for a month) side rises up against the notion that there wasn't a lot of dumb luck on our side this time, and we just happened to catch the Euroleaders and the Arabs in a particularly stupid part of their career.

Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die

Oh hey -- I forgot to mention -- exactly twenty days from now it will be my birthday. Guess how old I am? Okay, I'll tell you: forty! Yeah, the big four-oh. Only, I don't feel all old and used up. (I expect that will be how I feel tomorrow morning, when I wake up with a hangover.)

I have always wanted to be old. I think I meant "respected" -- I am old enough to remember when old people were actually considered more responsible and respectable than younger people. But I have never felt "old" -- just like I never felt "young." (I associate youth with guilelessness, delusions of immortality, and careless driving. I will swear on a stack of bibles that I have never had delusions of immortality.) When I was a kid my nose was always in a book instead of attached to the rest of me as I was out getting in trouble with boys or something. I wanted none of that wild life. What I wanted was peace and quiet so I could pursue my own interests. That attitude has so far done diddlysquat for me in terms of success, but I guess I am too old to change now.

I am not going to be selling my Jethro Tull albums, that I know. Well, maybe Stormwatch -- that was the last album I listened to of theirs. It had a couple of good songs (the title track, "Dark Ages") but it still was far below their best. I'm thinking of Aqualung, Songs from the Wood, and Minstrel in the Gallery -- and of course, War Child. I'm keeping all of those albums.

Neener Neener, Hollyweird Fascists

Good news: it looks as if the mutant rats of the left have been beaten back for now, and Boycott Hollywood is still online. Also, they will have a new server and hopefully some other domain name service-registry-thingie than Dotster. So, to Hollywood I say:

HAH HAH HAH HAH.
:PPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Really non-PC title deleted

Hahahahahaha.... "nucrear capability." Hahahahaha. It's in the transcript folks. (Post of 7:43pm May 3rd -- hey, wait -- I thought Wog Blog was in Australia -- shouldn't that be May 4th there already? Oh well, maybe the Wog Blogger didn't set his blog dates to Oz time.

(Psst: wanna see what I was gonna call this post? Click below:)

I was gonna call it "Freaks and Gooks." But that would have been so wrong, even for me.

MY. EYES. THEY. BURN.

This is so wrong. Now I have visions of Saddam's man-titties, as he dances around at a tailgate party in Gainesville after a successful Gators game. Excuse me, I need to go pour lye in my eyes.

Pennies from Heaven

Okay -- back by popular demand, it's the Paypal link. Over there on the right, under "donate." It will all go to a good cause (keeping me from whining about being broke). (Also booze, cigarettes, fast cars and bad boys! Or maybe just booze.)

Just kidding... you guys are great. If you don't want to give give give 'til it hurts to whiny old me, then here are a couple of other good blogger causes: Andrew Ian Castel-Dodge has released his cyberpunk novel as an e-book for only $4.99, and he needs a cornea operation; and please, someone help Jim Treacher get off his peanut-butter-sandwich diet and back onto his regular booze regimen (just kidding -- believe me, I sympathize -- guess what my meals consisted of today! So much for the all-steak diet).

So. Now I'd better get to writing some content, eh? Where was the link to the Automated Blog Post Generator...

Stuff for sale

Yes, I realize this template is bland and boring, and it also strikes me that it's kind of hard to read. At least for me. All the posts and titles and things look kind of the same. I'll be working on it, though not until later tonight. I shouldn't even be typing this.

In the meantime, I need to unload my old computer for some quick cash. Like fast. Let me 'splain: I unloaded my paycheck into my rent yesterday, and then bought some groceries, and then came home and opened the mail. Therein I found a lovely letter telling me my last check to the electric co. had bounced, and I owe them $135.17 by Monday or I will get to fester in the hot Florida dark for two weeks. I may still have forty dollars in my ha-ha bank account (which charges $30.00 per bounce). No, I have no idea why that happened, or how -- I suppose I could do the normal thing and keep better track of my checkbook.

Anyhoo, it's got a Pentium III 550 mhz processor -- it's one of those all-together motherboards which has everything on it, I forget what it's called, the documentation is at home, but it's got a modem and a network card, a 10 GB hard drive, and 64 megabytes of RAM. It's also got a 56x CD-ROM drive (not a burner, unfortunately) and a floppy drive of course. It also has two USB ports and all the rest, and comes in a nice big case with extra bays. Anyone who is interested email me. I do have a Paypal account. And I am located in the Central Florida area.

I'm also thinking of selling off most of my record collection, which is right now stuffed in the bedroom closet. Lots of seventies rock and eighties New Wave and alternative stuff. I keep meaning to write up a list.

Foul Bawl

I keep meaning to say something about this Norman Mailer character and his latest senile scribblings. All you need to know about this article is encapsulated in the title: We went to war just to boost the white male ego. It certainly seems to have worked in the case of Mr. Mailer, the personification of the He-Man White Male Writer Who's No Sissy Even If He Does Make His Living Typing.

Die! Die! My Darlings!

I just realized -- you all do know what this means, don't you? No one will ever believe that a postmodern poet actually spent time thinking up those non-rhymes and broken phrases he/she calls poems anymore. In the back of everyone's mind upon being inflicted with the latest unrhyming anticouplet or deranged pseudo-villanelle will be the thought: "Oh, sure, Mr. Sensitive just went to the Automated Poetry Generator website and got that bunch of gibberish." Yay! Contemporary poetry has been vanquished! Whoever this Rob person is, he's a god to me.

If only I had known about this last year

...I could have aced my Creative Writing class. Well - actually, I did ace that class, but still, it would have been neat not to have to actually have to think up a poem for the poetry part of the class. I hate writing poetry. Anyway -- it's something called Rob's Amazing Poem Generator, and you put a URL into it, and it will turn the website into a poem. Here is my blog, poemized:

Too Much To have forgotten
or discounted
in their worries that married
dear old dad Links All bore me!
Posted by Andrea
Harris at 10:31 PM | Link | Comments
4 | TrackBack 0 > My blogroll which mall MJ would
patronize. It was
bad enough when the southern
brew failing grades. Gee...
American wine snobs. Via
Tim Blair today well,
Not responsible for myself, Posted by Andrea
Harris at
12:07 PM | Link | Comments 1 | TrackBack 0 > TrackBack 1
new Faq AIM: for my blog
is speculation that describes
me BORES! By Andrea Harris at the end of calling it degrades
women? click.

Via Ken Layne, who is just going wild with the thing.

Help meeeeeeee

OH MY GOD.

I am doomed. Michael Jackson is looking for a house in Florida. I just saw a news bit on the local Fox station about him (+/-) being mobbed outside of a mall in Miami somewhere. I didn't recognize the bit of parking lot they showed. I wracked my brains trying to think which mall MJ would patronize. It certainly wouldn't be the one on NW 163rd Street. Hahahahah! The very idea -- they always have the riot police out there. The Falls? Dadeland? Bal Harbor?

I know I am in Central Florida now. But I am in no wise safe from the Evil Noseless One. Come on. Disney World rules this place. I'm doomed, I tell ya.

Run, Steve, run!

Light at the end of the orc-tunnel

A little cheap white zinfandel -- okay, three glasses, but who's counting? -- and watching Fellowship of the Rings again always makes things better.

Click for larger:

Yes, this is the sort of picture I take after three glasses of cheap white zinfandel.

Il Dunce

:D
:D
:D
:D

So funny: dumbest blog post ever.

:D

Via Dean Esmay.

(PS: Hey! Mitchell was a classic!)

Beached

I haven't posted much today or turned on the AIM for the last three days because yes, I haven't felt very communicative. The posts from yesterday and earlier today were efforts and creation that didn't go so well. Not that I have any regrets -- who, moi? -- but I seem to have drifted into one of my periods of disinterest in life in general.

I am already missing my Frodo pics -- beware of upcoming site changes. The skinning thing I want to do is looking to be a tad difficult, and I will be working extra hours (at my actual job) for the next two weeks so I won't have much time to devote to it. Maybe I'll just change the site look every day instead. Believe me, that is easier.

On the difficulty of liberal deprogramming

Some people have taken the president to task for his plane-flying stunt. From the tenor of the remarks I sense some vestiges of the "liberal" attitude that the military is, in a sense, something to be looked askance at. I did not say that these guys are anti-military, merely that the anti-military attitude that has poisoned the country since the sixties has colored their perception of this event. Here is a quote that may change their minds, or at least remind them of something that they may have forgotten or discounted in their worries that the president's actions were too "third world" (to whom I wonder?).

As for myself, I ignored the whole thing until it was safely over, because I am a big worrywart and I was afraid something would go wrong and there would be a disaster and I could not stand the thought of the media orgy of hysteria that would ensue. It was bad enough when that Kennedy sprog crashed his plane in the ocean. And when Reagan got shot (and not even killed)? Don't remind me.

Blogspot's new annoyance

This is what I am talking about (click for larger):

What the hell is that?!?

Spleenville weather: partly hostile with a chance of maniacal behavior later in the day

Yay! He's back! As for the rest of you, you all bore me! BORES!

By the way, some of you who have figured out how to open up my blogroll (hinty hint: click on "all the blogs." I am not responsible for non-responses in weird browsers based on Mozilla written for Macintosh computers using Linux. Bite me and get something normal) may notice a disappearance of certain blogs. They are all the ones that use Blogspot's evil software. But never fear -- they will reappear under their own blogroll, which will be dedicated to Blogspot blogs alone. I am thinking of calling it "Sad Blogger Loser Blogs," or "People Who Can't Figure Out How to Use MT or Some Other Real Blogging Software," or "People Too Cheap to Get Their Own Server Space," or something like that.

Hey, what did I tell you? Hostile! Possibly becoming maniacal! Get your umbrellas out!

Never mind. I'm kidding. I love you all, really. MWAH. (Iamsofuckingsickofnotbeingabletoopenblogsporblogsonacablemodemlineorgetti
ngthatstupidarchiveerrormessageorthenew"thiswebsiteunderconstructioncomeba
cklater"messagegoddammit)

Nothing's wrong with your browser

You know, me and my site changes. But don't worry -- no matter what this place looks like, it will always be mine. The look might change but the content stays the same.

At last, someone who understand me

Hey, it's the t-shirt that describes me perfectly. (I almost said "to a tee," but I stopped myself.)

Just like the girl that married dear old dad

(Warning: adult-only content ahead. If you get offended, you deserve it for not believing me.)

Did you understand? There is ADULT-ONLY stuff ahead, as in PORN. You want PORN, then click on the link to the extended entry. You don't want PORN, don't click. Easy. Offended by porn and think it "degrades women"? Don't click.

Now, on to PORN.

Well, I was looking through Tart Graphics, wondering if I should change my web page to one of these themes (tempting; it would offend so many people), and I got to wondering -- where on earth did they find so much vintage porn? Then I remembered that this is the internet. The first site Google brought me was RetroRaunch, a very pretty, nicely designed site full of naked old people before they were old (or dead).

Of course, since it is PORN after all, a lot of the pictures are -- well, hum, grandma! We hardly knew ye. And I read somewhere -- I can't remember where -- that people didn't practice oral sex until after the 1940s. Shyeah, right.

PS: you could open this page in another window and listen to it while you look. (If you have Quicktime installed the song will play.) I know you're looking. Aaah! You looked! Caught you!

I guess I am in a better mood now.

Songsongsongsingsingsingsong

Hey, now I know what Ken Layne sounds like. At least when he sings. For some reason I thought his voice would be deeper and scarier. I'm kind of relieved.

Public Service Announcement

I am in a very

Tiptoe around my blog until further notice.

My wine

Speaking of Australian wine, it appears that American wine tasters have given the southern brew failing grades. Gee... American wine tasters... choosing California wines over imported ones... I''m sure they were impartial. Well, this American wine taster has been quite pleased with the Australian wines she has so far sampled. As soon as I recover from my latest sinus bout I will be buying some Rosemount.

I hate wine snobs.

(Via Tim Blair -- today -- well, actually, tomorrow, since it's already tomorrow in Australia.I'm not even going to bother with Blogspot permalinks anymore.)

Hollywood Hypocrites

More proof that Hollywood's lip-service to the ideals of "speaking up for the downtrodden" and "the little guy" and "freedom of speech" is just that -- lip service. A rich, ripe plum of evidence is the letter the William-Morris Agency sent to Dotster.com (coincidentally, the same domain service that screwed up Lileks' site last weekend, and has some hideous website that tries to replace your home page with theirs). As consequence of this, Dotster.com is taking down Boycott Hollywood. The WM folks say that the agency has received email death threats. I'm sure they have -- and I'm sure they have received such things long before the Boycott Hollywood website was up. In any case, they took the typical big bully coward path to squashing the peons by going over their heads. I hope the people who run this website take the advice of their commenters and move their domain service and web content elsewhere. Note to self: don't use Dotster.com. Bunch of weenies.

PS: I forgot to say -- when the site goes down, I took screen captures. I'll post links to that instead.

Baghdad Museum looting update

The looting of the Baghdad Museum is looking less and less serious all the time. According to this article (it's in the NYT, who I assume can't be accused of being Iraqi war apologists) there are actually only twenty-five objects that are "definitely" missing, as opposed to the entire 170,000 objects that were supposed to be in the place. I guess I don't have to say that that's a big difference, do I? Of course this assumes that these twenty-five objects were still in the museum at the time of the looting. Were I a corrupt Ba'athist party official, or a member of Saddam's family, I don't think I would have wasted the opportunity to stash away that pretty gold harp for my own self. It was probably sold years ago and resides in some rich dude's personal vault.

There is more about finding glass cutters and keys in the museum mess, eyewitness accounts of "European looking" men who directed the crowd, and so on. Also some good news for manuscript afficionados: the manuscripts in the museum were spared, having been "bricked up." Also there is speculation that "90 percent" of the manuscripts and books in the burned-down Iraqi National Library had actually already been moved for safekeeping, but that remains to be seen.

Of course, it wouldn't be an NYT article without some standard grousing to take the edge off the good news:

The Iraqi cultural officials cannot help looking back to April 8 and 9, when their appeals for American military protection of the museum went unheeded. In conversation after conversation, the subject resurfaces, invariably with a bitter reminder that American forces were already protecting the nearby Ministry of Oil.

"I asked some soldiers why they did not stop the looting," Mr. Naqsa Bandy recalled. "They said, `This is not our duty.' "

Mr. Khalil said his experience was similar. "The U.S. forces and tanks were near the museum," he said. "They could have done as they did at the Ministry of Oil. Why didn't they? I don't know. We asked them. They said they were in the middle of a war."

Uh huh. They were being fired on from the museum's vicinity. (scroll down to the paragraph from the Chicago Tribune piece.)

(NYT story via Common Sense and Wonder.)

Seeds of our demise, part 2,789

From the Mutant Non-Sequitur Farm: while browsing through Winamp's skins, I came across this in the users' comment section of a Tool (the band) skin (warning, bad words and worse grammar ahead):

FUCK c31ic4 G7 posted on February 4, 2003 @ 10:03 AM
I don't even know what a skin is, but I stoped anyway just to say fuck any cunt ass mother fucker that says tool is gay. Tool is the best band ever and I know ppl who would kill you if they saw that you said that shit. If you think tool is gay then you didn't understand the lyrics and should shut your mother fucking mouth before you get bitch slapped. So shut your fucking mouth if you don't know what your talking about especially about somthing more important than religon. That's why were all going to hell in the first place. Because some dumb ass like you started making up his oun little shit and now we got 50 diffrent religons to pick from and they all say the others going to hell. so just shut the fuck up. Peace.

Oooo-kay.... whatever!

Story became legend, legend became myth

Archaeologists working in Iraq (yeah, that place) may have uncovered the actual tomb of Gilgamesh. Go to the article to read more about the fabulous ruined city they have found in an area the Euphrates used to flow through.

(Via Spinsters.com -- post of April 30th.)

Blog alarm

Uh oh. What happened to Juan Gato Ron Wilson?