To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Everyone knows that Frank J.’s Nuke the Moon tee shirts impart extra chutzpah, moxie, and other worthy attributes upon wearers, but sometimes the finely-tuned magic can go disastrously awry.
For example, the one that Rachel Lucas got is apparently defective, and dangerously so.
Can’t you see she’s leaning to the left!
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In Waukesha, Wisconsin, they’re throwing the new book at a guy who surreptitiously videotaped girlfriends nude. Well, not nude, since that’s art. They were naked. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:
Avello was charged with two felonies in February for possessing the tapes without the women’s consent and producing them while each was “nude in a circumstance in which she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
A possible legal problem arises since the videotapes were made in the late 1990s, and the law that they’re rolling up and spanking Avello with was enacted in 2001. Obviously, this would be an unconstitutional application, ex post facto, of laws. But this is a CINS (Crime Involving Nakedness or Sex) situation, so it’s important to chillingsworth this guy, lock him up for a decade or two, deprive him of rights to vote and own guns, and put his name in an extra bad database registry.
One of the State’s men says:
Assistant District Attorney Ted S. Szczupakiewicz disagrees.
“I don’t believe that time and place is relevant at all under the law as it existed in November, when the tapes were located and, according to the state’s position, found to be in Mr. Avello’s possession,” he told Binn.
There you have it. Ex Post Facto overruled by an ADA. Thanks for coming up with the idea, founding fathers, but it’s so eighteenth century.
Just in case you bump into a judge who disagrees, Mr., uh, Ted, you can always charge Avello with not having a business license.
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The Professor links to an article about the drive of Iraqis to learn English. It’s a neat piece, but here’s the most telling quote:
”We have not seen anything from the United States of what they promised,” he said. ”I want to help them help me.”
This particular Iraqi wants the United States to provide him with fresh water, electricity, phone service, and who knows what else. He wants the United States government to help him personally.
Sounds like these people are well on their way to the American form of government already. For whom can he vote to receive the best goodies?
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Pejmanesque links to a Washington Post review of Ann Coulter’s Treason and Tammy Bruce’s THE DEATH OF RIGHT AND WRONG: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values.
Anne Applebaum, the reviewer, says:
Yet about halfway through Treason, an extended rant on these subjects, I felt a strong urge to get up, throw the book across the room, and join up with whatever Leninist-Trotskyite-Marxist political parties still exist in America.
As I often suggest, Anne, get those books with which you are wont to disagree, particularly the more screedulous, in trade paperbacks so they’re suitable for throwing and stomping. My copy of Stupid White Men has been flung and crushed to the very brink of losing pages. If you’re reviewing galleys or advanced review copies, they should be safe for the throw.
Bonus question: Ann Coulter has escalated her criminal allegations against liberals from Slander to Treason in just one book. Wouldn’t it have been wiser to have different, intermediate level crimes between the two books. Perhaps Arson or Grand Theft Auto or Photographing Missouri Animal Research Facilities. Instead, by going directly to the most capital of crimes, how can Coulter escalate the rhetoric further? Will her next book be called Genocide or Crimes Against Humanity, or has she titled herself into a corner?
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I have not yet plugged it here, but Bob Ames is running a great site on Robert B. Parker and his Spenser novels at Bullets and Beer.
As I grew up a potential writer, Robert B. Parker offered a shining example on a hill. I described the experience on Bullets and Beer with my essay “Meeting Robert B. Parker.”
As a result, I have collected the works of Robert B. Parker. Bob’s got a list of my covers, but I’ve got a better listing of my collection.
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Sorry. I never saw it, but I remember the nature of Microsoft’s failed user-friendly construct, Bob. My darling Heather said that I was the second person to mention Bob to her recently(her formerly blue-haired boss was first). This Seattle Weekly story, which I saw on /., is the third source which confirms the fool thing actually existed.
Honestly, honey, Microsoft, back around Windows 95, had this little animated character that showed you everything you wanted to know about your home computer. Think of Clippy running whenever you turned the computer on.
Heck’s pecs, I had the Little Computer People Discovery Kit on my Commodore 64. Bradley, my little computer person, looked like Bob. In 1987.
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More wireless networking hysteria in today’s Washington Post.
Rule #1: The hackers are always smarter than you are.
Rule #2: The hackers will always have more time to try to break your security than you have time putting the security in place.
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In Illinois, anyway, where the Supreme Court has recently abjudicated its members and other statewide judges into a raise when the governor said the state couldn’t afford the cost of living adjustments this year.
Forget the constitutional crisis that occurs when the state comptroller doesn’t dish out the money. Let’s think about the wisdom of allowing a bunch of judges to sue non-judges. Where the hell do you find an impartial trial for that?
Oh, and lest we overlook it, these sagacious twits have decreed themselves a raise to $162,530 a year because they were barely scraping by at $158,103 a year.
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News flash:
“The nation needs to break the chains of our addiction to prison….”
Maybe we just need to make going to prison into a felony to deter people from doing it.
(Link seen on Drudge.)
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Mapchic tells a diabolical story about the hijinks that occur in the wine industry, particularly how those dastardly French winemakers operate.
Who needs French wine? Not me! Might I recommend, if you absolutely need a wine that sounds foreign (shiraz not withstanding), try the Concha y Toro Frontera Merlot. It’s dry. It’s red. It’s got alcohol.
The only thing better than a $4.99 merlot is a lot of $4.99 merlot, and the two often go hand-in-hand!
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In the June 2003 issue of Esquire, Ilene Rosenzweig writes “10 Things You Don’t Know About Women” which offers the following sage advice:
10. Women judge men by the way they drive. If you aren’t at least ten miles per hour over the speed limit, we think you’re a wimp with no ambition. Heavy foot on the brake? Too neurotic and can’t dance. We also analyze your sexual potential at mealtime. Drive fast. Eat slow.
I’ve been looking for a new philosophy, so I decided this one was it: Drive fast. Eat slow. Especially when trying to impress a babe.
I conducted some surreptitious research on this new axiom while trying to impress a beautiful woman last weekend and can offer the following corollaries:
You can call these the Brian J. Corollaries, if you wish, and you may use them at will in geometric proofs as necessary. Follow the corollaries as the axiom, and you will lead a more fulfilling life.
Oh, and one more hint, but this one doesn’t earn corollary status: order the couscous. You cannot eat couscous quickly without using a spoon.
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My beautiful wife links to a story about an Oracle manager, an Indian, who used his undue managerial influence to receive monicas from a developer, also an Indian. So of course she sued Oracle.
My beautiful wife says:
And the kicker.
The lawsuit said that Oracle knew or should have known of the different cultural and legal context in which Anand was used to working in India, where managers can often exert unfettered power over their female subordinates.
Um, no. What could Oracle have done, anyway? If it, as an entity, was unaware of said manager’s particular behavior, what could it have done?
You poor, uncynical creature. This is a perfect case of DIYD/DIYD (an acronym pronounced “died-died”). Because the Oracle did not treat the non-Caucasian differently than it would treat an American, it’s getting sued. Of course, had it treated him differently, he would have sued them.
Lawsuits all around! It’s a paradise!
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The St Louis Single Point-of-View is reporting that the whole Bambi-hunting thing, where people could pay $10,000 to hunt naked women in the Nevada desert and then, um, mount the trophies for a Nevada dessert, is admittedly a publicity stunt designed to promote videos depicting men hunting and, um, stuffing their ‘kills’ without a certified taxedermist present. Publicists would call that guerilla marketing, but those sorts of spoofs and hijinks are no laughing matter in LVNV.
But now he’s going to get the “Las Vegas is a Family Place” marketing brochure thrown at him. He’s being charged with a trumped-up misdemeanor charge because apparently misleading the news media is not yet a felony.
The story says:
The mayor said, “I’ll do everything I can to see this man is punished for trying to embarrass Las Vegas.”
So the mayor admits that he will wield all power that he has as a government official to punish this man for the bad behavior (not a crime, mind you, just bad behavior) of embarrassing (that is, causing a human emotional response of shame-lite) in a freaking social construct (the fiefdom of said government official).
What is everything in the mayor’s power? Fortunately, it’s not much:
“This man” is promoter is Michael Burdick. He could get six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for operating without a proper business license.
Fortunately, the avatar of Las Vegas has conjured a law with which to prosecute This Man so that he, the Embodiment of the Glorious City On Earth can find vengeance for the vast wrongs done upon The Almighty Yet Easily Embarrassed City of Sin. With this mighty cudgel, the petty tyrant shall once again affirm his power and his will.
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| And all this could seem like a dream out the door With everyday people, face down on the floor |
| from “The Secret of My Succe$s“ in the collection Big Life |
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My dear readers, I have hit for the monomyth cycle for you this time. I heard the call to adventure, that is, to read a left-leaning magazine to try to empathize with and understand the arguments of others. I crossed the first threshold when I bought such a magazine when I was in the belly of the whale at the bobomart where my beautiful wife buys her uberhealthy snacks and where I once bought an organic beer that tasted like barley soup. So I was initiated when I met with woman as the temptress, in this case Mother Jones (although I must admit I am not quite into the whole crone fetish). So I have returned, by the magickal flight of the magazine looping through the air as I tossed it in disgust, to bring knowledge, or at least a lot of words, about the experience.
The cover story, “Goodbye, New World Order“, retells the story of how the unilateralist cowboys in the Bush administration have wrecked the great edifices of the New World Order. You know, of course, what I say. I sing, “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road“. The New World Order can start picking through its own rubble for loose change to afford its bloated needs. Got enough to retire your population with full pay at age fifty and develop the third world (now promoted to the second world with the collapse of the original “Second World”) to a state of state largesse wherein the formerly-impoverished can also retire at fifty, too? No? Well, maybe you can find enough for a burrito instead.
Then, we hear about the weepy circumstances in Tuvalu in a story called “All the Disappearing Islands“.
It seems that this idyllic paradise features no arable land, offers jobs in fishing and gathering coconuts, and has a per capita income of $1,100, is threatened by (one supposes) George W. Bush (remember, he determines the fate of every living being on the planet). There’s no crime in Tuvalu (apparently, there’s no market for hot coconuts), and the people live close to nature (that is, at about sustenance level). It’s paradise to certain political thinkers.
Of course, the piece is more of a dirge than a stirring reveille. The piece harps that global warming is gonna keep happening, regardless of what we do, and humanity’s going to die out from our own wretchedness. So I won’t opt for a subscription to Mother Jones in case that happens before the subscription would lapse.
The photo essay “Too Beautiful For Death” describes Kashmir, the Indian province upon which Pakistan wants to get its mitts. The pictures are beautiful, of course, as the region must surely be. The text by Suketu Mehta wrings its hands suitably about how this area could lead to the single most devastating war to ever occur, and soon. It’s hard to miss the significance of the numbers of millions or hundreds of millions who could die in such an event. As if that’s not bad enough, the article’s final pièce de résistance:
But so violently vital is the idea of Kashmir to both nations that they have thrice gone to war over it. The next war could escalate into a nuclear confrontation. One nuclear bomb on Bombay or Karachi could kill more people than the entire population of Kashmir; and it would not stop at one bomb. Kashmir is an impossibly beautiful greenhouse for death, which could grow to engulf the peoples who have planted it and nurtured it with Kashmiri blood and tears, grow until the entire subcontinent is filled with the insane screaming of dying elephants. [Emphasis mine]
Dying elephants? What the schnuck? Never mind the people, but save the Indian elephants?
In the story “Keeper of the Fire“, a writer wraps its forelimbs around the leg of an anti-capitalist crusader who’s out to raise labor costs required to manufacture the cheap goods we enjoy in this country without realizing that this successful crusade will drive investment from the underdeveloped regions benefitting, belatedly, from the Industrial Revolution and will make products we take for granted impossible to afford. After all, if a low-seniority union laborer who earns $20 an hour plus benefits spends two hours making your blue jeans, they’re not going to cost $20 at Kohl’s any more.
By the second paragraph, before anyone sensible could grab a break stick to pull the swooning writer from the profilee’s trousers, the writer gushed this about the dreamboat liberal:
Technically, he is a part of the National Labor Committee, a letterhead group of four or five in a small warren of rooms loaned by UNITE in New York City. But beneath this façade he is an independent, a man controlled by no backers, free of any union, immune to academic nuance.
All righty then. Dick Cheney once worked for Haliburton, and he’s forever damned as their puppy. George W. Bush once ran the Texas Rangers, and now he’s in Major League Baseball’s batting gloves’ pocket. But this guy is actively employed by the unions, and he’s a renegade, unbeholden to anyone? That’s when I fell for leader of the pack (vroom!).
About this time, I am just flipping through to find the back cover. Hurrying past the reviews, and BAM! There it is! An ad for www.banpoundseizure.org. It says:
The betrayal must end.
(cute dog picture)
Some states still allow or require the release or sale of healthy, adoptable dogs and cats from shelters and pounds to research labs or schools where they likely will be killed.
Oh, please, it’s not as though the shelter gets on the horn the minute a golden retriever arrives and says, “Hey, Igor, I got that brain you wanted.” I would guess that research labs are the second to last resort for animals that have not been adopted and are going to be put down. And not all research labs kill all the animals that pass through.
Oh, I do understand that animal whack job organizations want every shelter to be a no kill shelter, which means public animal control become infinitely growing housing projects and welfood programs for the good of a sub-sentient species. However, it’s just not feasible. Don’t say it is. Don’t. You nutbar.
And then I finally made it to the end of the magazine, not much dumber than when I started. Some of this stuff is so a priori wrong that I cannot understand it. To whom are they talking? People who don’t like Indian elephants or puppies dying or don’t want impoverished people earning money, I guess, and unfortunately this American nation has too many who hold those soundbite views without deeper understanding.
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I heard on the radio today a commercial for the newest and bestest Lasik eye surgery techniques, which explained that whatever new gimcrackatron they’ve devised certainly beats the traditional Lasik methods.
Undoubtedly, Dr. McCoy would agree that those old, traditional means of Lasik surgery (such as those deployed against Virginia Postrel) were medieval butchers and that they were only one step above using leeches to suck that astigmatism right out of the eyeball.
Pardon me, but my family doesn’t have a generations-long tradition for opening the front of the eyeball like a can of french-cut green beans and firing a computer-guided thing-we-used-to-call-a-“laser” against the retina until it scorched enough of the cones and rods to make things better, as though it was a military expedition to win over the hearts and minds of my optic nerve with napalm. Oh, yeah, and then they close it back up, and it either works or you’re blind, oops.
Pardon me, but I have done too much QA with computers to trust them with anything like the impressionist-themed remainder of my vision, thankyouverymuch. Sure, I realize that the chances of failure are slim, but I buy lottery tickets with slimmer odds.
So my traditional Lasik surgery technique is mocking the very prospect. And as a conservative, remember, I demonstrate:
So thanks, but no schnucking way thanks.
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Steve Chapman, of the Chicago Tribune, asserts (registration required) that intervention in Liberia would be a pointless waste of American time, money, and lives.
He’s right.
Sorry. I meant to say, “Indeed.”
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El Guapo, an actual card-carrying Libertarian, has recently taken to writing to our shared Congressional representative Todd Akin to express his views as a constituent. El Guapo apparently e-mailed Representative Akin about his views on medicinal marijuana. Rep. Akin replied:
Thank you for contacting me to express your support for legalizing medical uses of marijuana.
I am not sympathetic with the movement to legalize marijuana for medical use. The active intoxicant in marijuana, THC, is already available by prescription in pill form. I am not aware of any convincing evidence that raw marijuana provides any notable advantage over this legal pill. On the other hand, I am certain that marijuana is a gateway drug for millions of teenagers. While not every marijuana smoker moves on to harder drugs, virtually everyone who abuses cocaine and heroine begins by smoking pot. I am hesitant to support any legislative initiative which might jeopardize the lives of youths, and undermine the efforts of conscientious parents, by legitimizing marijuana use in the eyes of the public. No one doubts that the legalization of medical marijuana use is the first step toward legalizing its “recreational” use; advocates of drug legalization openly admit this. To me, this first step constitutes an unwise gamble: risking the lives and health of teenagers to achieve a small-scale and dubious medical benefit.
Please do not hesitate to contact me again with any thoughts or concerns.
A principled response, apparently to El Guapo’s e-mail.
I wonder, though, if the answer was canned. After all, someone I know once wrote, with pen and paper and stamp, to Def Dicky Gep, her congressional representative, to protest that the government had made AVSCOM, a military command and her place of employment, into a smoke-free environment. She smokes. So she wrote her Congressman.
Someone in the Congressman’s office scanned her letter, found the word AVSCOM, stamped the canned response letter with the Congressman’s signature, and stuffed it into an envelope. The constituent received a nice letter addressing her concerns about the impending closure of the command to save the federal budget. Def Dicky Gep was against it, believe him.
So that, too, was a principled, well-reasoned response.
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Hollywood scientists today have announced that they have found a cure for sapphism. Sapphism is an affliction known to, well, afflict innumerable sorority sisters, cheerleaders, housewives, and female prison inmates as well as other members of society, as studies (well, visits to the local non-chain video store) have shown.
The cinemackly-proven treatment for this affliction: the Ben Affleck character.
In the first trial, Chasing Amy, Ben Affleck’s “character,” a comic book illustrator of a singular facial expression, cures Joey Lauren-Adams’ character of rampant and visible Sapphism. Although this first trial was promising, Hollywood scientists were cautious, not yet proclaiming their discovery.
However, in a second trial, Gigili, the Ben Affleck character, a person of undoubtedly immobile visage, cures the Jennifer Lopez character, inducing her to seduce a male with such come-hither lines as “It’s turkey time. Come on, gobble gobble.” (as reported by researcher Dr. Drudge.)
In double-blind studies, the Ben Affleck character was not found to cause harm to straight males (the Good Will Hunting study) or females not afflicted with Sapphism (the Bounce trial, among others). Scientists are encouraged by these findings and hope to submit the Ben Affleck character for FDA approval.
Competeing scientists, afraid of being locked out of a Ben Affleck character patent, have begun studying similar compounds such as the Bruce Affleck character or the AFLAC duck character in hopes of producing a similar affect. Early tests of these generic alternatives, however, are not promising.
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Charles Sanders Peirce is one of the smartest guys you never heard of. He lived in the 19th century, studied a bunch of sciences, and pretty much founded the particularly American philosophical movement called Pragmatism. Granted, if you have heard of it, you’ve heard about what later thinkers like William James and John Dewey did to a perfectly good philosophy.
For example, I just re-read “The Fixation of Belief” which describes scientific inquiry as an epistemology that beats out mysticism and insanity. If you’ve got time, I’d recommend you read the whole thing. It’s written clearly, without the cant used by contemporary academics to defend their tenure in esoteric philosophical journals. This essay appeared in Popular Science magazine back when scientific thought was popular.
Maybe I’ll do a longer post sometime about how Peirce’s thought meshes well with Objectivist and Existentialist strains in my own thought. If you, gentle readers, could stomach it.
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