To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Former hockey great Mario Lemieux tells Pittsburgh that if they don’t buy his socialist self a hockey arena, he might have to sell the Penguins. Because unemployed steelworkers should provide his millionaireness with benefits to his business.
He claims he has three offers, but I would think he’s bluffing, or he’s counting bar talk. NHL Hockey is not exactly a sellers market these days.
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Zudos to Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who demonstrates through his review of The Chronicles of Riddick that he truly has dizzying intellect:
In the grand hall of a mothership that resembles a mid-century Chrysler on steroids, the Lord Marshal mentions that the Necromonger army is composed of forced converts from other religions. So maybe “The Chronicles of Riddick” is supposed to be a parable about American imperialism, sweeping other cultures into its maw.
Let’s see, we have a culture that either converts, enslaves, or kills other cultures that do not adhere to its tenets, and that culture represents American imperialism? One man stands against them, but Williams doesn’t enlighten us to whether that one man who fights reluctantly against the hordes illustrates the struggle of stringy-haired Berkleyans, French diplomat sophisticates, or the Arab street. Wholly schnucking deconstructionism, fatman!
His college professors must be awfully damn proud of him.
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Belatedly, Michael Williams learns a devastating drawback to blogging:
One of the difficult things about hanging out with people who (occasionally) read your blog is that they’re already familiar with all of your A-list material (and, let’s face it, I use most of my B- through M-list material here, too).
Reminds me of this one time I stood beside a former rugger who was busy popping the heads off of crawdads….
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A hockey tidbit. Jeff Gordon, in today’s Tip Sheet in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writes:
How can St. Louis host a diving championship and not invite Tyson Nash?
Meow!
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I’m calling it officially! In November, my vote will cancel out Bruce Springsteen’s in the presidential election! I called it! You’ll have to find your own celebrity to thwart.
Oh, I know how it works. I can’t cancel it out because he’ll vote in New Jersey and I’ll vote in Missouri, and we’ll vote for different electoral college members. But still, symbolically, he’s all mine.
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Suicidal Youths Turn to Hanging Instead of Guns!
A new report finds that suicidal young people are less likely to use firearms to take their own lives, but the survey finds little comfort in the trend because they are turning to more readily available methods.
In the last decade, suffocation — notably hanging — has overtaken firearms as the most common way for adolescents to kill themselves, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
Time to start banning the clothesline for the Children!
(Link seen on Drudge.)
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Now that some research has indicated that dogs understand language, up to 200 words, how long will it be before they can vote in California?
Just wondering.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Sylvester Brown, Jr., says:
It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead.
He then goes on to bury Reagan, not to praise him, and speaks ill of his policies and contributions to the world and the United States. Somehow, he villifies McDonalds inappropriately and I guess blames Reagan for modern America’s victim culture, well, no, he blames Reagan for leaving sharp objects and soft, tasty Big Macs lying around for sheepish citizens to consume in bulk. Or something.
This guy has a full time position as a newspaper columnist.
I’d blame Reagan for that, but unlike Sylvester Brown, Jr., I listen to my elders (excepting newspaper columnists) , and I wouldn’t mean it.
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At least, that’s what I hear when a CEO of a profitable company wants the Federal Government to fund his R & D.
So let me get this straight….space travel, which only will be profitable in the long term, should be open to private capital and research, but chip and computer design, which yield profits now, should be funded by Mississippi citizens who live in tar papered hovels, or Montana citizens in kerosene-heated mobile homes?
Suck it up, pinko. Your duty to increase your shareholders’ wealth and your own bonuses does not come at the expense of the U.S. Taxpayer.
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Examined at Pop-Up Mocker.
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Michelle Malkin has a blog.
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He’s written a column for Tech Central Station about why governments don’t fund research dedicated to increasing longevity. You have to read between the lines, but Professor Reynolds is actually advocating an increase in Social Security benefits! Because heaven knows that the age of funding has not kept moving upward at the same pace as longevity, even the natural way. So if you add two or three decades (or centuries) at the end of life, Social Security will be dished out at a maximum of something like seventy-five, meaning the codgers willdraw it for half a millenia. Is that what he really wants?
On a serious side, though, if the government funds the research, it will have to provide the resulting cure to everyone in the population. Our electorate would, unfortunately, expect nothing less than immortality funded by tax money.
Couple that with disparate availability of the drug (and I do assume it will be a drug) between developed nations and underdeveloped nations with a large birthrate and less love of life than we have, and suddenly you have the makings of World War V or World War VI or World Wars V-IX. Werd.
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The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports about the difficulty Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., has in firing a deputy:
As a dispute escalates over discipline of wayward deputies, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is trying again to fire a deputy who kept his job after smashing into another car and fleeing while intoxicated off duty.
Clarke is attempting to build a perjury case against Deputy Victor Erato III, whose dismissal was overturned by the county’s Personnel Review Board.
Swell. Drinking and driving and leaving the scene of the accident. In retrospect, it does seem harsh to hold some blue collar working law enforcement official who has a chance of getting shot every day to a higher standard than the state’s attorney general, Peggy Lotsalager.
On the other hand, why does the Personnel Review Board and so many other oppose standards of behavior for law enforcement officials? Do they want to have authorities that citizens can easily disrespect?
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In his column today for the Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg begs for a public delinking from Musings from Brian J. Noggle:
Don’t you feel sorry for Wisconsin? I sure do. So close to Chicago, yet still an isolated nowhere of cows and dogtracks and cheese, populated by those who never got their lives together enough to move here. Wisconsin is like the dim brother who lives in the basement and nobody talks about. You don’t want him teased.
HOW DARE YOU, SIR? That’s it, turn the fans on high and point them south. SHARE THE DAIRY AIR!
I would publicly renounce Steinberg and delink him, tossing his endorsement of my genuis into the Chicago River from the Wacker Street bridge in full view of the Chicago Sun-Times building, but no one would notice, except perhaps a cop who would fine me for polluting. How would he know?
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I kinda feel a certain pity and outrage on the behalf of Courtney Love on her charges:
“CJ” has obtained a copy of a brand new charge filed against Courtney Love. And this time it involved assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily injury. The charge stems from an incident last April 25th, to which Los Angeles Police responded. According to documents from the District Attorney, Love assaulted a woman by the name of Kristin King by throwing a bottle and a metal flashlight at her.
Hey, I have seen Kiss of the Dragon and Daredevil, both of which depict homicide via stick pins, so the next time some prick bothers a woman, is it assualy with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily injury? Or what about shoving someone and they fall over? If applied with great enough velocity, the earth will kill you.
I guess the answer is, “Yes, if the prosecutor wants to intimidate you into pleading to a lesser charge.”
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It’s an unstable, immature language for desktop applications, and people die from it.
(Link seen on Fark.)
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Hugh Hewitt has the story of a visit by Toby Keith and Ted Nugent to a base in Iraq as part of a USO tour.
Thank you, gentlemen; you’re proxies for us stateside, showing our appreciation for what our soldiers are doing.
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Ever overheard a conversation when two people whom you don’t really like gossiped about you? That’s what I think of when I read this piece in Slate: Swingers: A guide to the swing states: Missouri.
Like all Midwesterners, Missourians believe they reside in the most authentically American of places. I grew up in Kansas, just a few miles across the Missouri state line, and I’m guilty of this Midwestern indulgence—I’m fond of telling my wife, who’s lived in New York, Texas, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., that she has yet to reside in the United States. What distinguishes Missourians, though, is that they stake their claim to genuine, right-thinking Americanness on more than mere geographical middlingness or plainness of speech. Show-Me Staters marshal reams of scientific data to back up their assertion of pure red-bloodedness.
Texas brags that it’s a “whole other country,” but Missouri proudly declares that it is the whole country. Talk to a Missourian about the state’s politics for more than a few minutes, and the words “microcosm” or “representativeness” are likely to surface.
Not if you talked to me, you coastal pipsqueak. I don’t think Missouri is a microcosm or representative of the whole country any more than New York City, Washington, D.C., or Boston are. I do think that we in the Midwest understand better the regionalism of the country, that is, the properly federal nature of the United States. Becuase we know ourselves and because the media continually run as contrast a loop of the coastal, self-important mindset–which excludes the views of residents from elsewhere because it doesn’t recognize they exist, or because it thinks that its postmodern intelligence and relativistic morality supercede the rubes, we recognize and understand the difference. But I digress. And I’m not smart enough to summarize the mindset of millions of people based on a three-day swing through the state.
I got chips like dandruff, brother, and coastal commentators brush them off rather glibly.
Is it just me, or is Slate becoming as unreadable as Salon these days? I admit freely, at the possible expense of the mounds of junk mail the Republican Party sends me, that I read Salon daily in the late 1990s. I found its writing edgy, hip, and concerned with culture, the arts, and affording me a different perspective. Heck’s pecs, I even bought stock in Salon, for crying out loud–stock I hold to this day because I would spend more on broker’s fees to sell it than I would get for it. But somewhere a little before it started requiring commercials, it became a one bongo drummer, thumping an uncompelling political beat.
Slate’s about one bad day from losing my daily traffic, too. Cosmo types psychoanalyzing the quaint states that comprise the majority of the union and desecrating the dead rather repel me.
And Slate hasn’t yet dissed Wisconsin yet.
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Aaron, of Free Will Blog, casts a critical eye and two rhetorical fists of iron upon the airline industry:
It’s something of an illusion to suggest 9/11 caused their problems. That’s only a popular excuse for today: Despite air travel growing an average of 7% a year throughout the 90’s, the airlines still struggled, and are still struggling today to deal with passenger drops from the Gulf War. In 1991. They weren’t profitable in 2000, either.
There are only two possibilities here: They are either incompetent, or the demand for the massive infrastructure they’re trying to float simply isn’t there. In either case, they suck at doing business, as demonstrated by last year’s debacle, asking workers to take a 15% paycut to avoid bankruptcy, while simultaneously increasing their own bonuses to run away with more tax money in their pockets.
We’re sucky crony capitalists, Aaron. We understand laissez-faire, where one company’s (or industry’s) weakness, failure, or strength means more opportunity for others.
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Hey, I am from Milwaukee. I know all about the flying rat problem upon which Whitney Gould reports in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Aggressive and messy, gulls are the new urban menace:
Like something out of a Hitchcock movie, they’re lined up along the rooftops of buildings, on parking lots, on grassy plots, on the gravel wasteland left behind by demolition of the Park East Freeway spur. Gulls. They’re everywhere, it seems – and so are their droppings.
Think that’s the problem? No, sir, it’s just a symptom. I got your real problem isolated:
Scott Craven, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a good food supply is part of the attraction in urban areas. “We’ve created a wonderful habitat for them after they were beaten back for years by egg and feather collectors and persecution,” he says. “This is their rebound.”
The birds are protected by federal law, but when they reach nuisance levels, their eggs can be removed with permission of state and federal wildlife officials. In extreme cases, such as Manitowoc’s, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has given local officials permission to shoot limited numbers of gulls.
Andy Paulios, a state Department of Natural Resources wildlife manager, said the best approach is for communities to monitor gull numbers, recognize that the birds are here to stay and then work for a consensus on where they can be tolerated and where they cannot.
To summarize, the problem has three parts:
Class, is this story an example of a man versus nature or a man versus overbearing state authority conflict?
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