How to piss me off

Email me with your self-righteous fuckheadery. Example: I just received this from one Mark D. Firestone, who seems to think I give a shit what he thinks:

Meryl - Re: "Anger, yes. Misplaced? Perhaps not." - My two cents are as follows:

There are plenty of organizations in the world that are infinitely more deserving of my charity dollars than any that is currently collecting for Iran. The anger is NOT misplaced when millions of Iran's citizens openly support the mullahs' anti-Semitism and stupidity. It is unconscionable that ANY Jewish - American group would collect for Iran in the face of their religious leaders' stance on accepting aid from the "Zionist Regime". I AM in a position to donate money to charity, and my next charitable contribution will go to any charity I can find that does not support any victim of the recent earthquake in Bam, Iran. When you dig your grave, you can damn well lie in it by yourself. In case Andrea and Michelle are hard of hearing that is not just NO to aid to Iran, but an unequivocal FUCK NO!

Mark D. Firestone - California

Blah blah fucking blustering blah. Note to MISTER Mark D. Firestone of California:

KISS. MY. ASS.

No, I'm not hard of "hearing," I just... wait for it... DISAGREE with your self-righteous chest-pounding garbage. To put it mildly. Gee, I guess it's time to dig up that clichéd-yet-true statement, "If we become like them then the terrorists have won."

No, I'm not going to open comments; I'm not really interested in what anyone has to say on this subject anymore. And I would appreciate it if MISTER Mark D. Firestone, California, did not email me ANY FURTHER.*

Taking a cue from the very fine comments of Gary Farber to this post of Michele's, I will give Laurence and Meryl the benefit of the doubt in that they were posting in the heat of anger, and NOT ONCE did I say that their anger was unjustified, considering things like this are being done by terrorists. What I said was that their anger was, in this instance, misplaced. The target of their rage (again, JUSTIFIABLE RAGE) should be the leaders of Iran, not the hapless people under their rule who may or may not be Jewhaters and terrorist supporters but certainly are, at least in Bam, victims of a natural disaster and therefore at minimum due the sympathy of fellow human beings worldwide who are just as mortal and just as vulnerable to the ravages of nature. But fuck me if some people haven't decided to use this for their own aggrandizement. Thank you, once again, human race.

*The fucking jerk asshole just sent me another forward. It's some sort of letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, but I'm not reproducing it here. Hey, babycakes, I'm not your goddamn shoulder to cry on/punching bag/audience/publicity venue. Taking me off your goddamn mailing list -- I don't know who you are and don't want to be on it. Leave me the fuck alone.

I'm a tad pissed, yes precious. That's why the name of the site is SPLEENVILLE. Goddammit, my dinner is getting cold while I type this. You do NOT interfere with my food.

Eh

Oh never mind.

I'm dining in tonight

It looks like I've made myself a nice mess of Can O'Worms Stew. I need something to wash it down with. Does anyone have any gin?

Ladies and gentlemen,
Take my advice:
Pull down your pants
And slide on the ice.
-- Major Sydney Freedman

Recipe for disaster

Misplaced Anger Pie

Ingredients
Take:

Half a cup of misfortune.
Two cups of justifiable outrage.
One cup of blind partisanship.
Three tablespoons of schadenfreude.
A teaspoon of spite, or enough to curdle the mix
Break two or more heads against each other; mix the brains in with the other ingredients until the mixture is lumpy.
Pour into pie shell made of burnt floppy disks. Cook for several weeks, months, or years over low heat (however long it takes), turn up during the last hour of cooking to five-thousand degrees until crust is blackened.
Eat, until ulcers occur. Repeat until all dinner guests are dead or have fled the table.

Update: the pie goes down faster if you wash it down with a big glass of You Can't Possibly Understand juice.

SERIOUS INTERVAL: it's late, so this will be short. In reponse to Meryl's paean to the wonders of Not Understanding what it's like to be Jewish and faced with this situation, maybe she should ask Pejman how he feels, and see if she can "understand" his position as an American-Iranian-Jew. See, maybe I can't "understand" what Jews go through, not being Jewish myself. But, you know, by that criterion I can't understand what it means to be Chinese, or Yanomamo, or male, or a victim (yet) of a suicide bomber, or anything but Andrea Harris. This is an absurd attitude, which assumes that since no one can truly know 100% the experience of someone else then you can't possibly have anything to say about that other person's experience. If people were truly this way, we'd have no novels, no poems, no marriages, no.... anything.

But this is already getting longer than I wanted it to be. Let me finish: when I say that Laurence's (and, I guess, Meryl's) anger is "misplaced," I mean just that. Denying aid to the victims of the Bam earthquake does very little against members of Hizbollah or any other Iran-sponsored terrorist group, unless by some silver-lining happenstance one or more of the key members of such groups perished in the rubble. And it hurts the mullahs that run that country with an iron fist not at all; quite the contrary -- if any of them should happen to hear of any such reaction to their decree they will probably only feel more truculently righteous in their hatred. As for demanding that the victimized and oppressed people of Iran prove they deserve your regard by "rising up" against their government; well, that's easy for someone on the outside to say. Then again, that would take "understanding."

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

What the fuck? Did everyone take a Pissy Pill today? I go out and have a good time, I come back and I get a ration of shit. The only experience I have had close to this is coming home from my first U2 concert ever (1985, the Unforgettable Fire tour) and getting to observe the contrast between my mood and the usual surly, petty crap from my dysfunctional family.

Good morning, not-Vietnam

I feel like my weekend was too short. Note to self: next time you decide to go to the mall via the slooowww buses they have here, start earlier. There is something inexpressibly dreary about taking the last bus home in the dark. (Yes, I have done my budget, and unless I get an unexpected Paypal windfall from a rich fan, I won't be getting another car this month.)

Anyway, concerned reader Darth Monkeybone, who really needs to get his own blog so he can "fisk" things himself, hinty hinty -- look Ma! free blogs! -- sent a couple of items this way, begging me to tear apart Michael Moore's newest ungrateful whinge, as well as Ted Rall's latest poop-smears, but doing so would necessitate my actually looking upon and reading their works, and since 'tis the season to be jolly I think I'll pass, thank you. Instead I'd like to point you all to Peeve Farm, and this hilarious entry about an excursion into San Fran with a snotty French college student whose every utterance, meant to make him Stand Out From the American Sheeple, is a well-burnished Eurolefty cliché. Brian Tiemann is kind of a left-coast Lileks, right down the the Mac-ophilia, and since Lileks is doing the "I'm-on-holiday" thing I think I'll be reading Peeve Farm more often.

PS: oh wait! I should have known James would not be able to keep still after yesterday's news -- there's a whole entry with lots o' words (& the best Saddam Photoshop ever) on today's Bleat. I'm gonna save it -- he's not doing archives this month.

Ah, Salam, no like 'em*

I do so love insomnia.

Anyway, it looks like James Lileks has been on the receiving end of that phenomenon of the sphere o' blogs known as the Delinking Letter. One wonders if Muslims do it thusly: "I delink you, I delink you, I delink you."

Anyway, I had thought of adding my two pennies to this swirlyfest over Salam Pax, the letter, and everything. Then I got to reading the reactions of others (start here and work your way back), and then I got to Brian Linse's hilariously self-righteous girly-slap of Lileks, and I decided that this subject had just jumped the shark.

Besides, I had grown bored with the little Baghdad pantywaist ages ago. Sorry, peeps, but living under a totalitarian dictatorship does not automatically confer sainthood on one. (That's for all those leftoids hopefully proclaiming "Bush = Hitler OMGWTFBBQ!" Sorry to have to break it to you this way, Sunshine, but you'll be just as much of a failure of a human being under fascist rule as you are in a democratic republic.)

Anyway, I had lost interest in Pax once it became clear he had 1) survived just fine, and 2) become a pet of the chatterati of Western Europe. I knew then that barring an intervention -- from, say, his pal Raed, who doesn't seem to have been offered celebrity hosannas even though the blog they both started was named after him -- we weren't going to hear another useful word out of Salam Pax.

I wish James hadn't apologized for one little thing. I guess it's some Midwestern thing, to get embarrassed over a cuss word. I wouldn't have been so vehement myself, but that's because I'm jaded. But I don't think James owes the dinkwad delinkers and Pax-worshippers (in more than one sense of the word) one ounce of contrition for anything.

As for the whole notion of delinking, well, that's one of the many reasons my blogroll is private. No one sees who I have on my blogroll. In other words, I have basically delinked everyone. Beat that, prissies.

(* Well, if Treacher can do it, why not me?)

More on everyone's favorite subject

Hey boys and girls. I decided to read the Kim Du Toit essay one more time. You know what? As under par for his writing skills (and possibly just slightly fraudulent) as I consider it, I don't disagree with much that's in it. Maybe the guys-as-slobs thing. Most of the guys (non-gay, non-wimpy) I have known are neat freaks, whereas most of the women I know are slobs.

Oh, and that Gay Guy Dresses Up the Breeder show. I think he was a little too soft on it. I lasted exactly one nanosecond of hearing the lead queen's nasally whine before my hand hit the remote. I guess I don't see what's so "funny" about a show that parades bigoted stereotypes in our faces. I can't understand how self-respecting gays can possible approve of this show -- what, are you so desperate for society's approval that you'll whore yourselves out for this clown act?

Oh -- and as for charges of misogyny because some middle-aged white guy wrote something that was less than worshipful of the female sex (or at least the distorted paragon of womanhood that infests the culture like a yeast infection), yeah, right. Just a few hours flight -- or heck, depending upon where you live in the US, just a few minutes drive -- away from you there are men who make Kim Du Toit look like Patricia Ireland. But this is what you choose to get upset about. Please, talk to the hand.

Be a playa hata

"They won't call me Deltaville Sissy Balls because I'm a man now!" -- Florence King, on the literary efforts of "Gonad Manqué," in "The Gay Confederation."

You know, the more I think about it, I think that Kim's man essay was a hoax of some kind. It's not just the fact that it read like someone imitating Du Toit rather than the man himself; it was the stuff about John Belushi being one of what Kim considers to be "a real man." Exqueeze me? Belushi was a man of many talents, but he also shoved coke up his nose and a needle in his vein until his heart exploded. What kind of a "real man" does that to himself because owww fame hurrrts... Please. Because of his cowardice and inability to deal with the adulation and other perks of his celebrity-hood we lost a very funny actor, never mind what it did to his friends on SNL.

So anyway, I have been thinking about it all day, and I have come to the conclusion that yep, we are being played. I was going to email Kim Du Toit and argue with him about some of the things he said but forget that. I don't like being played.

Manly men re-redux

Could someone tell me where the apparent 100% slavering admiration for Kim Du Toit's man-rant is in Glenn Reynold's post on it? This blogger* and this blogger and this blogger** all claim to see this. I, on the other hand, see Mr. Reynolds poking subtle fun at Du Toit's credo. I mean, come on, the riff on the cookware-as-tools thing is so a satire on the trad-male role. I think that while Mr. Reynolds may think that some of the issues Kim raised are valid (such as the over-reliance of the advertizing agencies and media on cheap misandry to sell product) he seems to find Mr. Du Toit's approach to be rather silly. Perhaps Mr. Reynolds is too subtle for this Great Global Communicator Interwebbe thingie.

*Scroll down to "Are we not -- er, men?" -- this blog has no permalinks. Yes he does.

**Scroll down to "the human race" -- Blogspot's permalinks are incredibly screwed up, as usual.

More on the manly man thing

Andrew Dodge on the term metrosexual, as well as a brief comment on The Man Essay:

Kim makes some valid points, but he hides them in a thick vaneer of machismo, swearing and downright idiocy. I mean, he praises The Man Show, one of the lamest things on TV. He lays into Queer Eye for a Straight Guy as well, obviously totally missing that its suppose to be funny!

I watched a few episodes of The Man Show back when I had cable teevee, and it struck me as a one-joke show with a short shelf-life. A few of its episodes were amusing (there was one where the guys set up a booth at some college feminist festival of some sort with a platform of "stopping women's suffrage"; half the people that came up to them had no idea what "suffrage" meant -- obviously they thought it meant something like "suffering") but I didn't think much of it. As for the Queer Eye show, I tried to watch it, and lasted for about thirty seconds until the whiny voice of one of the principals drove me to grab the remote. Perhaps if I still had cable teevee I'd give the show another chance. Also, I guess this show's conception and popularity means that terms like "queer" and thinking of gay men as being obsessed with fashion is okay for straight people to indulge in again.

Be that as it may, people in the comments to this post have already pointed out that terms for something like "metrosexual" already exist: "fop" on the negative side, and "gentleman" on the positive side. I have another one that is somewhat negative: "dandy." All those terms seem quite adequate as well as preferabble to the silly "metrosexual." Whoever came up with that should be forced to eat an entire Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Strongmen

Re: the Du Toit essay discussed below, I just wanted to add comment on the "strong male" theory before I read any more commentary that gets the wrong idea. Some people in the various comment threads on Kim's essay have denigrated the idea of the strong man by comparing Kim's ideal to the "macho cultures" of other countries like those in the Middle East. "Look!" they say, "there's a 'strong man' culture and look at all the violence perpetrated on helpless women" etc. etc. I beg to differ.

Countries like those in the Middle East and elsewhere like that are not populated by "strong men" in the sense that Kim was getting at, where the strong man is a responsible man who takes care of himself and his family, is a rugged individual, and so on. What these cultures are are "alpha male" cultures, where there is one strong man -- (or in the case of places like Saudi Arabia, a group of select "strong men") who lord it over all the others. The rest of the males are forced to curry favor with the man/men on top in a way that no strong Western male of the sort Kim was describing would countenance. These men, forced into a position of weakness by oppression, then turn on those weaker than themselves, women, boys, other men of even lesser social stature. So you really can't dismiss Kim's argument by using the "macho" cultures of other countries in this situation.

Forest Trees Man Woman

Listening to the radio in the car the other day I heard a song I hadn't heard in, oh, a couple of weeks or so: "Sex" by Eighties band Berlin. You remember the lyrics -- they go something like this:

She: "I'm a bitch."
He: "I'm a man!"
She: "I'm your slave."
He: "I'm a man!"
She: "I'm an IRA account at 5.7% fixed interest..."

And so on. Anyway, this song has been in my head for the past few days now. Here's why:

Kim du Toit has a new essay up. It's called "The Pussification of the Western Male."**

What?!? You had no idea??

I have read through the essay a couple of times, and I confess I can't understand why, out of all the inflammatory, goading things he has said about many a subject, this is the one that has set Blogville on its ear. I think the funniest thing about all the screeching and hyperventilating is the outrage over his use of the word "pussy" in its various forms. I mean, I thought "cunt" was the female-genitalia-insult word that was beyond the pale. Getting steamed about "pussy" is so Seventies. By the way, I guess it is no longer cool to use "dick" disparagingly either.

You shouldn't laugh so hard. You could sprain something.

Other than that, I don't have much to say about the essay. It's basically a distillation of his entire weblog; kind of the Cliff Notes' Kim du Toit. Frankly, I've never liked abridged works. I would only read my parents' collection of Readers Digest novels (abridged works that came in hardcovers of three or four to a book) when there was nothing left in the house to read except that or whatever I had for homework. I think he let his rant flag fly a little too free here, and people, as people will do, are picking up on the Outrageous™ statements and skipping or missing the good points he did make. But he had to go and make that silly statement about frat boys and some supposed epidemic of college campus rape. (And I thought that über-male Patton said "A man who won't fight won't fuck." So will they fuck or won't they, the cowardly girly-men?) I'm not sure what causes men to rape women -- or boy-men to rape girl-women who were raised to say "No means no" but were also told that college was a place where they would be surrounded by an elevated atmosphere of pure Wisdom and that boorish, stupid males would be left behind in their hometowns asking people if they wanted to supersize their fries, so that when they actually found themselves in the smoke-hazed dorm room filled with drunken bumping and grinding coeds they had absolutely no idea how to say "no" to the cute boy with his hands in their pants. But my solution to the college-rape problem, if one exists, is to go back to sex-segregated dorms, dorm monitors, and curfews. This won't happen, of course; we'll never admit to ourselves that turning eighteen does not automatically confer upon us all the wisdom of adulthood, and that not allowing eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds to live cheek to jowl en masse will cause them to go insane (or worse, become Republicans). (I will note that in much-maligned ancient Rome a man wasn't truly considered a man until he was over thirty.) Of course such measures didn't prevent all sex-related problems, but they certainly put obstacles in the way of the majority of people who are put off by a little difficulty.

But I've gotten off the subject just a little bit, I think. My thoughts simply won't come together on this thread. Of course the media pushes a viewpoint of men that sees urban men as ineffectual, passive-aggressive wimps and rural men as barbarian terbacky-spittin' bullies; rich city men buy stuff, unless they fall under the influence of poor country boys and turn off the teevee so they can go hunting and fishing. And we need more bureaucrats -- government is a growth industry -- thus the Ritalin. And while women are stereotyped as controlling and sniping by the advertizing and entertainment media you have to admit it's a rather insulting portrayal in its own way.

I will say this to Kim, though: why, why, WHY did you have to bring up the Man With Titties? I had almost wiped all memory of that thing out of my mind. (Note to people who are luckier than me and don't know or don't remember the source of the Man With Knockers: some dingbat of a fashion designer thought it would be the kewlest most rad thing to have male models parade around with fake tits underneath tight sweaters. I never saw a fashion "trend" vanish so fast -- it disappeared faster than Vivienne Westwood's miniskirts with bustles*) But Kim brought it all back. Damn you! Damn you to hell! Now I have to go wash out my brain with Lysol.

*No, I hadn't hallucinated that show in 1985. Click on "history," then choose "80's," then choose "85." Observe the "mini-crini."

PS: Spoons said it better anyway.

Update: I edited some incorrect grammar and added an extra remark or two.

**The link is down. Kim's site has moved to a new server, and I assume the essay is somewhere, thought I can't find it on the page.***

***Oh, there it is. If it was a snake -- it would have been a trouser snake! Heh heh.

Throw mama from the train

I dunno who Polly Toynbee is -- some Guardian columnist, so I guess she's a "leftie" or whatever you want to call them. Anyway, Peter Briffa makes fun of her a lot. This article of hers that he quoted made my hairs stand on end just a bit. She's talking about some politician Over There:

True, you will have to charm the decrepit blimps and blue rinses from the shires into voting for you.

Ooer! That'll get them in the sticks. Here in the States grandma, gramps, and the attack dogs in the AARP that protect their every interest are still mostly sacrosanct to both sides of the political spectrum -- on the right, because that's where they get most of their votes, and no one kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and on the left, because lefties still want to be seen as "compassionate." Obviously the left in Britain has no such constraints... I don't know if that means our handling of the over-fifty-five constituent is better or worse here than in the UK, I just know that if I read or hear anything from any foreigner about how badly we treat our old people in the USA as compared with the ROTW I will have yet another reason to just giggle for hours.

How to make friends and influence people

The two things our culture is obsessed with -- sex and intelligence -- are also the two most overrated facets of human existence. When it comes to the former, I'm with Florence King: "I've had sex and I've had food and I'd rather eat." As for the latter, just read some of the comments in the preceeding post. So much intellectual display; sometimes I think the birds are better off. At least the mating dances are pretty.

All I can say is, I have known plenty of smart people who were nasty jerks, and plenty of supposedly low-intelligence people who were nice as can be. The obverse is, of course, equally true. But the internet has a way of hiding all the wonderful things that make his parents and girlfriend put up with Mr. Brain. It's too bad so many "intellectuals" don't seem to know that.

They shoot horses, don't they?

I had a post going about this, but it was getting long and unwieldy. I have cut it down to a few observations about "The Florida Vegetable Woman," and why I am trending towards the side of the Catholics in this case. Here they are:

First, about all the fuss over Jeb Bush's eleventh hour pen-stroke. They are saying the action is a misuse of government power, it sets a bad precedent, and so on. Well, misusing government power and setting bad precedents are politics as usual in Florida, I thought we had already established that eons ago. "Will this corruption be used in the service of good or the service of evil?" seems to be the way Florida politicos think. I don't know any other way to explain it, except for the possibility that Florida is the site of a Hellmouth.

Here is the weirdest reaction so far to this drama, and it comes from the usually level-headed Connie du Toit:

The relationship between a husband and wife is SACRED.

To that I say: not when the husband is fucking another woman and said mistress is bearing his outside children it isn't. I do not think that I am under any obligation to give this "marriage" an honor it does not deserve.

People who are in the pro-death crowd don't seem to have put any thought into their conclusions. For instance, the "I wouldn't want to live like that" reaction has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo and what she may have or might now want. This, my individuals, has nothing to do with your wants and needs. If you are really concerned, do what Terri Schiavo apparently didn't and put it in writing, and have it notarized in front of witnesses. We don't allow oral agreements to take precedent over written ones in mere business deals, I don't see how something someone else asserted someone said (ie, the husband insisting his brain-dead wife had told him -- pre brain death -- she'd be all for euthanasia in case she became a drooler) gets to take precedence over our normal state of not killing people when they become "burdensome."

There happens to be a couple of other sorts of humans who, while breathing, pooping, and making sounds on their own can neither clean themselves, feed themselves, or discourse wittily upon the last episode of Joe Millionaire. They are: babies and senile old people. I don't read the newspapers all that much so I missed where we started exposing unwanted babies and Alzheimer's victims to the elements.

I don't see what the problem is with letting her parents take care of her if they want to so much. Probably money is involved somewhere. My solution -- which will not be implemented, of course, this not being a perfect world run by me -- is to give them what they want. The husband wants her dead, for various reasons; but I'm sure an adulterer can be bought off. If the parents balk at this, then they were never serious about taking care of their daughter, they were just doing all this for spite, so at least we'll have that out in the open. (And after the parents die, let the Catholic church take care of her. Make the Pope sign papers or something; no looking up hubby again years after the fact, none of that. And no taxpayer money is to be paid for this woman's care; I put that in for those of you who are keeping all your earnings under your mattresses and go off like a firecracker into anti-Statist™ rants every time you think you might have your taxes used for something you don't like.)

I think that all this brouhaha reveals that fear of 'tards is alive and well in the twenty-first century. "Ew gross, a 'tard! Kill it!" seems to be an almost atavistic reaction to the sight of a mental defective or the thought of becoming one.

Something in our culture just drains the humanity out of people; how else to explain the fact that starving someone to death is considered to be kinder than just giving them an overdose of morphine, or putting a bullet in their heads. The real reason this method is preferred, of course, is that everyone can pretend that Terri Schiavo isn't being deliberately killed; they are simply "letting nature take its course." Nature -- that we have spent the last ten thousand years or so trying to thwart. Now we let it win one?

It is also interesting how all these libertarian atheist euthanasia supporters suddenly seem to believe in something approximating a soul, since they are so so sure about what Terri thinks and feels, as if there is some sort of "Terri" separate from her physical body that is trapped like a rat in a coffee can and just wants to be "set free" by having the body killed. I am afraid that the "please kill me and release me from the horror of (some state)" is a civilized attitude that has to be learned, and I rather doubt that someone who is a vegetable is able to formulate this opinion. It is more likely that if Terri Schiavo is capable of thinking or feeling anything, it is at a very primitive level, and fear of death is the most basic of emotions. The least that could be done for her is to not draw out her suffering. If you really think she should "have peace" (be dead) then shoot her, you spineless wads of mucous. At least have the stones to do that much.

"Allah on line one on the white discourtesy phone"

It would be so totally wrong and against the cause of Bringing Our World Closer Together© to call 1-800-95-fatwa and have "legal" rulings based upon sharia -- Islamic "Law" -- issued against your mother-in-law, that neighbor's dog whose barking keeps you up at night, Marvin the Martian, and so on. But as the song says, if buggin' Muslim fundy-freaks is wrong, I don't wanna be right. (Via Daimnation!)

Compare and contrast

Men.

Babies.*

(Link to the Arlington Cemetary story via Charles Austin. Link to the Mefi prattlefest via Michele.)

*PS: I am exempting from this designation, of course, the people trying to defend the toy drive against the tiny minds that seem to comprise most of the contributors to this list. Maybe the Mefi'ers are jealous that the Iraqi kids will be getting toys and they won't.

Ignorant foreigners

You know, I don't care what foreigners think of us, I just wish they weren't so arrogant about their ignorance. Allow me to make a sweeping generalization: when Americans find out that they don't know enough about something out in the wide world (say, about Muslims and what they really think) they hit the bookstores and libraries like earnest students trying to make up for a failing grade. Foreigners, on the other hand, tend to show a marked disinterest in actually finding out what Americans are really like, preferring instead the notions they formed after watching American movies and teevee shows -- which as we all know are all documentaries. [/END SARCASM]

Europeans especially seem to have this idea that they already know all they need to know about the world, and that this gives them the right to sit back and lecture those upstart Americans (which means citizens of the United States, neither Canadians nor Mexicans nor anyone else in the hemsiphere ever gets this treatment) on world affairs. Europeans -- at least the citizens of certain countries cough France cough -- also have this notion that they are cosmopolitan, "citizens of the world," and thus have some sort of neutral, if not omniscient, view of life on Earth. Europeans just hate it when it is pointed out to them that their viewpoint is just as parochial, if not more so, than that of the average housewife in Iowa.

Allons enfants de la Patrie

Aux armes citoyens! Defend France from the evil Friedman beast!

Amour sacré de la Patrie
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs
Liberté, Liberté chérie
Combats avec tes défenseurs!
(Source.)

Unwanted callers

I suggest that before this situation occurs again, Meryl acquire: the soundtrack to The Omen; a long, black robe (preferably high-collared, or even better, hooded -- but one of those decolletage-revealing Morticia gowns will do in a pinch); one of those long barbecue lighters; and some tall, black or red pillar candles. Put the candles on a table by the door, add a bowl (a suggestive stain of some dried substance on the bottom -- ketchup, or coffee -- will add to the effect), some dead flowers, and a figurine of a gargoyle or skeleton or something (it's Halloween -- you can probably get cheap plastic crap at the dimestore). Have the robe hanging ready on a hook by the door. Have the cd in the player cued to start. When that knock on the door comes again, flick on the cd, light the candle with the lighter (incense would also be nice, the real churchy kind), and pull the robe on. Then open the door. Of course, this would really go over well if you had makeup on that made you look like a zombie, I'm thinking white Halloween face makeup with green lipstick and black eyeshadow (again, cheap at the drugstore at this time of year!) --

Then again, maybe this is too much trouble to go through.

Na--aah!

Does this outfit go with my crucifix?

Via Amy Welborn comes this news of a new edition of the Bible -- one "designed to resemble a fashion magazine," called Revolve (yes, they even renamed it). It's supposedly aimed at teenage girls, because as we all know, teenage girls are stupid:

We at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville did some research and found that teens don't read the Bible. They say it is too freaky and too big and it doesn't make sense. The only thing they read is fashion magazines, so we thought, What if we made the Bible look like a magazine?

What if you left them the frack alone? Oh well, all babies have to eat...

Internet Memo

Subj: Even more appalling
Date: Eternity
From: Me
To: Internet creeps everywhere

Ooh, threats now. That's mature. Could all internet bullies, cretins, and psychos do the rest of us a favor and go back to hell?

Appalled, again

Jesus

H.

Christ.

OCD's Paradise

Tim Blair has found what one reader calls a gold mine: the ummah's answer to Ann Landers, Ask the Imam. If you go by this site, the Muslim world seems to be geared towards the sort of person who has to count all the table and chair legs in the room before leaving, and who sorts her used twisties by color and length. Sample question:

Is the embroidery stitching technique called "cross-stitch" forbidden in Islam ?

I am a muslim women who likes to do embroidery at home. One of those embroidery is called "cross-stitching" which consist to do "X" stitching on a cloth in order to have as a finished product a geometric pattern or floral pattern on many parts of the cloth (like a tablecloth for example). You have to criss-cross strands of cotton in order to make a pattern. The reason i am asking this question is that a sister came forward and told me that it was forbidden because the stitching technique looks like crosses (actually it's little X's that you make wich doesn't appear much because of the tickness of the strands).The patterns that i do are not of human or animal kinds. Only geometric and floral. Allah knows best.

Answer:

It is permissible to do the 'cross stitch' technique in embroidery.

And Allah Ta'ala Knows Best

Mufti Ebrahim Desai
FATWA DEPT.

Well I sure am relieved about that. And here's something for you anal-retentives out there:

I need to know whether a person can read an english magazine while passing stools in the bathroom 2.Also if the magazine has a subscribtion label which has muslim names like muhammed so will it be wrong to take this magazine in the bathroom? 3. Also if we can throw these magazines or letters with names like muhammed or other sahaba names in the garbage? will it be unrespectful? 4.also if a women can keep her face open only during ihram if it is very hard to cover with the baseball cap being with small children? 5.I recently was applying super glue to something and after 4 or 5 days noticed a small amount about 2 or 3 mustard seed size spot on my fingernail, I scratched it witg my teeth and it came off, my question is will this very thin layer of super glue on my nail make all my salats and ghusl void? will I have to repeat all the past 4 or 5 days salats?If u can also give me some dua for being afraid at the smallest things and the dark. Jazakallah amd MAy Allah reward u for your time and effort. Ameen

Spelling and punctuation quoted as is. The answer:

1. He is not allowed to read any type of book or magazine whilst in the toilet.

2. Refer 1 above.

3. To some extent, it would be disrespectful to dispose of them in the garbage. If the magazine is an un-Islamic magazine, you may dispose of it in the trash can.

4. It is permissible for her to leave her face exposed in the state of Ihraam.

5. This thin layer of glue would have prevented water penetrating. Hence, the Salaats performed since then should be repeated.

6. Recite Aayaatul Kursi in abundance – especially after every Fardh Salaat and before you retire at night.

and Allah Ta'ala Knows Best

Mufti Muhammad Kadwa
FATWA DEPT.

CHECKED AND APPROVED: Mufti Ebrahim Desai

Well that's it then -- Dad would never have converted; there would have been no way he would have willingly forgone his morning reading hour. (By the way, why do I get the feeling that this site is one giant spoof, set up by a doofy guy in a satellite with his robot friends, and that when this question came up they danced around shouting "a Daktari stool! Ha ha!")

Going to the grocery store

I grew up in Miami and lived there until 1999. As everyone knows, there are a lot of Cuban-Americans there. And just about every Cuban-American family still has relatives in Cuba, and just about every one of those families has a story like this one. (Note: "guajira" means something like "country bumpkin" in Cuban Spanish.)

I got to hear a lot of similar stories from friends and coworkers, and have even met their relatives who were either "fresh off the boat" or "just visiting." This is why the admiration that many so-called liberals have for Castro will always remain incomprehensible to me.

(Via David Strain.)

Another reason to celebrate the 4th

How about the fact that this sort of thing can still happen in modern, secular Britain? (The Times article is registration-only for people outside the UK. I'm not sure if it's free to register any more; their registration process is confusing.) Here's an excerpt:

A COUPLE are to be ordered to pay £95,000 for repairs to a 13th-century parish church because their nearby farm was formerly church land.
The House of Lords ruled yesterday that ancient laws meant that Gail and Andrew Wallbank are liable to help with the upkeep of St John the Baptist Church in Aston Cantlow, Warwickshire.

The test case affects thousands of smallholders. About 5,000 parish churches could now enforce similar orders on private individuals who own former glebe land — church land that was often rented out to bring in funds for parish maintenance. The decision relieves hundreds of Church of England congregations, already struggling to pay clergy stipends and pensions, from yet more crippling liabilities.

Mr Wallbank said: “We are pretty appalled and devastated. Everyone agrees this is a bad law but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. We will have to sell the farm to pay for it.”

The Wallbanks became liable for the repairs to the church chancel when they inherited Glebe Farm in Aston Cantlow — where Shakespeare’s parents were married — from Mrs Wallbank’s father. The land is a quarter of a mile from the church but it formerly belonged to the church as glebe land. After the Reformation, the glebe land passed into private ownership and the owner was appointed “lay rector” of the parish.

Lovely.

(Via Cronaca.)

Forget something, Monsieur?

Charming. Those Frenchies sure are more cultured and civilized than us.

Oops, and so they are.

Sunday fun

Early this morning I dreamed that I took the wrong bus, then got off the bus when I discovered my mistake, and as I watched it drive away to who-knows-where, I realized that I had left my purse, with my cell phone, all my keys, and all my ID and money, on the bus. I hadn't figured out a way to get my purse back by the time I woke up. Dreams like that leave me invariably grumpy and unrested, so I decided to roam around blogville. (At least I can't lose my purse there.) I came across the blog of Fr. Bryce Sibley. He has amusing links, such as this Flash thing cautioning the world about The! Whore! of! Babylon! As the good father says, guess who it is. Complete with cheesy horror-movie music and a picture of a rather cool-looking dame riding a neat seven-headed beast. Gotta get me one of those when the End Times rolls around... hey, I don't know about you sinners, but I plan to go out in style. He also has a link to the Mr. T haiku page. This gives me a horrid vision of a mass held entirely in Latin rap...

Paying for it

I skimmed this entry by Steven Den Beste on legalized prostitution. I am not particularly interested in what people do with their nether regions or their cash. If they are adults I think they should be able to do what they like with and to other adults, as long as no one gets maimed or killed. That's all I have to say on my personal views of the bumping of uglies.

But I do wonder if we should be so sanguine about the eventuality (so Steven declares here) of widespread legalized prostitution here in the US. I only know what I have read, really, so my info is no doubt biased. Here are a couple of things that have shaped my thinking on this matter (what little thinking I do of it):

Ursula K. LeGuin is a super-liberal scifi writer. I like a lot of her stuff, anyway, despite the PC-ness of a lot of her recent work. A few years ago she published a novel/thing/collection of stories (it's not easy to describe it) called Always Coming Home. It's based on a "future past" society of neo-Native-Americans living in a kind of post-apocalyptic Shire. I didn't really care for all of it, but one phrase in it stuck with me: in a story about a girl who leaves the idyllic valley to go to live with her father's backward, sexist tribe, and finds out that she doesn't really fit in there either, she decides to get married so she can have sex. The character describes her decision (I am paraphrasing since I don't have the book anymore) this way: "Since I could not be happy, I decided that I would have pleasure instead."

A couple of weeks ago I was idly flipping through channels and I came to that Catholic cable channel (the one with Sister Mary Angelica and crew). There was a priest -- actually a friar, in a monk's robe, I forget the order, which ever one still wears gray robes. He was talking about the days when he used to be a priest in an inner city neighborhood somewhere. A lot of the women who would come to his mission or church or whatever (I'm not Catholic, I don't know what it should be called) were prostitutes. He was talking about them, not in a condemnatory way as you might expect, but just describing what he had observed. He noted that many of them who happened to have daughters all had ambitions that their daughters not join them in their own "trade," but that they get married and get out of that kind of life. Of course, this is just a small segment of society, limited to one point of view, but I did think that that was interesting.

But Steven says something here that I think is also interesting, and betrays to me a certain blindness of just what is cause and what is effect:

Prostitution is legal in several nations in Europe now, and clearly hasn't led to the downfall of society there. (Their societies are collapsing for other reasons, but not for that one.)

Well, I don't think that legalized prostitution is causing the downfall of anything, or that it ever has. I think that an increase in certain of what I will call "indulgent behaviors" is not a cause, but a symptom, of what I am not sure. But I think of that quote, dropped into a story whose protagonists belong to a pacifistic, sexually-relaxed future society, about people who are not happy turning to "pleasure" -- there meaning enjoyments that are temporary and ultimately unfulfilling -- and I think of those women wanting their daughters to get married to one man instead of servicing many strangers for money, and I just wonder if the solution to whatever problems we have is to make prostitution into just another career option.

Real Tards

I have a new email from Mork/Graham/Whatever to fool with edit but I'm too busy right now. In the meantime prepare yourself with readings from The Tard Blog.

Oh... Kay Kay Kay

I see the K³ discussion is starting to get lively, and I have a few things to say about what's being said -- but not tonight, I'm exhausted. I'm going to watch the end of McMillan and Wife and go to bed.

Read Paul Jané's entry on this subject in the meantime.

Update: and Dean Esmay's post too.

Butterfly Dundee?

Slander! Will Australia's citizens come to the defense of their native land and refute this accusation?

I have a friend, a most attractive young woman, who set off for Australia a few years ago in search of a husband. I suspect that her quest was inspired by the film Crocodile Dundee, because she likes her men manly. After about 18 months, however, she gave up in despair and returned to England, still single. She told me that she had picked the worst country in the world in which to go man-hunting: all Australian men, without a single exception, were homosexual.

Though if I were an Australian male confronted by a British female whose criteria for a mate was a propensity to hang out with crocodiles, I'd be tempted to claim the other side of the blanket too.

(Via Steven Den Beste.)

Cultural exchange

Far from being uninterested in other people in other lands we Americans are desperate to communicate with them -- or at least, to type at them and have them type back. Jeff Jarvis needs to cut back on the caffeine a bit, though:

What comes out of this: A hundred Salam Paxes. A thousand Salam Paxes.

I mean, I'm sure Salam is a great guy and all but I'll bet even he would draw the line at maybe just five copies of himself.

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.

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.)

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.)

Wanderlust

::Sob:: I wanna go back to England...

Teller plõksib

It's another Estonian blog. This one is actually in Estonian. Help, Sam!

Anyway, collecting blogs in foreign languages that I don't understand is a kind of hobby of mine. This one has some nice site design, and he even offers wallpapers. Only two -- perhaps there will be more. And I have already learned one word: "Otsi" obviously means "search" or its equivalent.

France is dreaming

Anarchy for La Patrie.

(Via Rand Simberg.)

Well this is interesting

Afghanistan's foreign minister is expressing interest (as they say) in normalizing relations with Israel. Well well well... die of effing shock? Or... maybe realize that it has occurred to the Afghans that "Hey! We aren't Arabs! Muslim, shmuslim, even we can figure out which country in the Middle East is the success story that isn't just based on the accidental placement of a large amount of a single natural resource." (Note: you'll have to register -- it's free -- to read the article.)

(Via Amish Tech Support.)

Flag-waving

What's with those wacky Iraqis? Don't they know that they are supposed to be insulted when American flags are flown in their country? Come on, people -- get with the program!

Wonderful

Tim Blair is right these are the wonderful photographs. Of course, some people don't see it that way. (See my previous post.) Oh well. Sucks to be them.

News from the ex-hometown

I've not been to Miami in about two years, but I was born and raised there, so if you hear about an anti-Castro protest in the form of huge traffic jams consisting of Cuban-Americans in their late model Chevy Impalas beeping their horns in that city's streets let me tell you the reason why:

In a highly unusual move, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana on Wednesday night warned Cubans not to undertake any more hijackings, telling them in a message read on communist-run television that they would be prosecuted by U.S. authorities and lose the right to seek American residency.

The message by James Cason, chief of the U.S. Interests Section, demonstrated growing worries about the possibility that such hijackings could end in violence or spark a migration crisis.

PS: the reason that's on a Canadian news site is that Canadians love going to Cuba. Sorry, Canucks, but you do. Anyway, here's the Miami Herald's take on it. Incidentally, people in Miami used to put bumper stickers on their cars that said "I don't believe the Miami Herald." I forget what facet of the Ongoing Crisis caused that -- probably some controversy concerning the Mariel boat lift that made my final year of high school so... interesting. That and the riots.

One thing I miss about that town are the 24-hour Cuban cafés. The only place in O-town that doesn't roll up the sidewalk at midnight is Denny's.

(Via ken Layne.)

Fear of maps

A remark by Colby Cosh in this entry ("the famously geography-shy American public") reminded me of something that has bothered me for years: the idea that Americans have some sort of cultural block against knowing how to find out where other countries are on the map, and other evidence of xenophobia. It occurs to me that this is a meaningless slam that is based, apparently, on 1) childrens' geography test results -- I'll leave aside the reliability of a method of measuring cultural knowledge of an entire society based on how much its children know about things -- and 2) man-in-the-street interviews -- we know that interviewers, especially for television news outlets, never pick the most comically dumb people for their filler segments. [SARCASM OFF]

Anyway, to say Americans, who have provided the world with satellite imagery of the globe and Mapquest.com, where the travel section of most large chain bookstores have map sections bigger than the travel book sections (and where yes, you can get maps of other countries beside the fifty states), are congenitally afraid of geography is to show just how powerful the meme of "stupid Americans" is. Well, you all just keep telling yourself that. We might not have cared where Iraq was in relation to Illinois last year, but I can bet you even the common American man on the street knows where it is now.

Update: Colby Cosh replies! I have one question though, at the risk of sounding dumb -- what's "geographical imagination?" Also -- yeah, the editors and such went to university, where no doubt they had to "suffer" through at least one geography class -- or maybe not, it's not always a required course these days.

Now I am ready to concede that there is a "Geography sux" theme that runs through much American humor. But humor isn't always a perfect mirror to reality. And that's more of a subset of the School Sux humor genre, which is just a subset of the Hard, Boring Work Sux humor genre. And what's wrong with the example of Mapquest? I admit I just pulled that out of... the air, as I was trying to think of examples of the American map industry to show that people here not only have no problem with utilizing maps to get where they want to go, but that we have invented useful tools for doing so. (Of course Mapquest is just an online version of a fold-out roadmap, but it saves us a trip to the gas station.)

Anyway, I don't think that the reason the news media puts up lousy maps has to do with their fear that a detailed map will scare away viewers. I think it just has to do with the time factor, and the fact that to the professional media this fancy graphics stuff is still considered secondary to the talking heads and the live reporting. As for the lack of complaints about this, I can tell Mr. Cosh that his is not the first complaint I have come across. Mommabear, on On The Third Hand, rejoiced when she found a decent map; in fact, StrategyPage seems to be the map site of choice.

(P.S.: I didn't factor in the attitude of Canadians towards Americans re geometry -- I was following the time-hallowed tradition of ignoring general Canadian attitudes towards anything, and what do they need to know geography for anyway, there's nothing to look at up there but ice and snow and elk. Two! Two snarks in one! Oh, I'm going to hell.)

Too Much Information

I think this is supposed to be some sort of anti-American diatribe, but like most of these frothing incompetents, Mr. David Aaronovitch ends up unwittingly making the target of his ire look good. Behold:

Now, among nations, there is only America to fear, and it has never been difficult to get Britons to feel antagonistic towards the Yanks. There is, lurking, some kind of folk/race memory of the time when GIs came courting our girl-friends with nylons and oral sex, neither of which our boys could offer.

(Bolds mine.) Oh dear. I'm sorry to hear that, pre-World-War-Two British oldsters. I certainly hope that you have made up for your youthful deprivation... Anyway, Aaronovitch goes on to say that Americans are "pushy, insensitive, rapacious, successful and rich," and that everyone on the Sceptered Isle is pathetically obsessed with us. You know, I'm not sure he wanted to make his countrymen look like neurotic, sexually-inadequate, envious cowards. Then again, like many of these lefty Brits, he seems to think that humanity is a mirror.

(Via Give War A Chance:.)

Married to the world: a rather laborious analogy

Steve H. connects to an article in a South Korean paper that purports to show that the majority of people in that nation are French. In other words, they believe that we want to conquer Iraq and steal all its oil, yadda yadda.

The position the United States seems to be in these days with many of its supposed allies can be described using this analogy: we are like the guy in a marriage characterized by bickering, backbiting, and ceaseless accusations and contradictory demands that he is unable to fulfill. Nothing he can say will please his bitter shrew of a spouse, whom he married out of obligation rather than love. She is constantly threatening him with divorce, but the minute he even hints at wanting to leave on his own terms rather than be ignomiously thrown out and then soaked for alimony for all he is worth, she pulls out the tears and the claims of being too weak to go it on her own, accuses him of abandonment, and so on.

The Iraq situation: she's found out about the girl he's been trying to help, who's been trapped in a relationship with a brutal thug. (Guess who.) The husband is trying to help this girl for his part in getting her into trouble -- let's say he didn't help her years ago when he could have -- but he doesn't plan on leaving his wife for her. But you know how insecure shrewish wives are.

Our relationship with Britain is also part of this scenario. See, the guy also has a friend, an old ex-girl friend. They had a real serious blow out in the past, which means they will never get married, but that is all behind them now and they have stuck to each other through thick and thin where it counts. Naturally, the wife is jealous of that relationship too.

What we really need, in other words, is not a World Court, but a World Divorce Court. It's time this marriage was ended. Wifey has to learn to stand on her own two feet -- and learn that doing so does not mean obsessing over every last little thing that her ex-husband does after that. She has more than enough wealth socked away in little accounts she has kept secret from us, so she doesn't need any alimony. She doesn't need us to hold her hand. (Isn't that what she is always saying?) I say start the divorce proceedings now. After all this war-against terror stuff is done with the next words I want to hear are "All rise -- World Divorce Court with Judge Rummy is now in session!"

Support from the North

It's Canadian Friends of America. No really. It's true! Steal an image to link:

There's more on the site.

(Via Instapundit.)

US too arrogant, Pt 693274

Goddammit. I turn on the tv for some news and the only station that I have with news is NBC, and they had to go and put Katie Couric on with some broad from the Foreign Relations Committee. Ms. Rachel Bronson was billed as a "Senior Policy Analyst" but she came off more as one of those girls who was in all the clubs, whose main preoccupation (when not backstabbing her way to the top of every high school group) was bothering all the independent-minded students in the school. ("How can we draw you out of your shell, Andrea?" "You're such a bright girl, you should join some clubs so you'll have someting to do.") Here she is, very Concerned that the administration has pissed off all the foreigners. ("In the previous Gulf War we talked to China!") Yeah, daddy Bush's administration was much more attentive to the world's "needs." That's why we are in this lovely situation today.

Update: She's back on, cooing about how the Iraqis need someone to cuddle them into the dictator-free world. For chrissake, they aren't five-year-olds going to kindergarten for the first time, they don't need self-esteem counseling. Please, someone keep hot, moist paragons like this away from the Iraqis.

World Whine Web

Did you know that Indonesia was the most populous Muslim nation in the world? (As opposed to those Muslim nations not in the world; I've always wondered about that common turn of phrase...) Anyway, duh -- but the newsbeings at NBC are very careful to inform us of the National Geographic Lite fact before telling us that the entire archipelago is against the attack on Iraq, and are calling for the UN to "call an emergency meeting." Chortle. Yeah, go ahead, have your little meeting, diplomatical creatures. Somehow I get the feeling that "emergency meeting of the United Nations" somehow doesn't inspire that The Day the World Stood Still frisson of terror in the White House these days.

We want our MTV!

Please, America, infect us with your culture, plead the people of the Ivory Coast. They've had decades of direct and indirect French rule, and they are sick of it. They figure having to listen to J. Lo on the radio is a small price to pay to never have to eat Yoplait yogurt again.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)