To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A survivor of the Bali terrorist bombing recently expressed the sentiments we all share when the admitted terrorist shouted “Allah Ackbar!” in the courtroom.
Jake Ryan, a survivor of the bombing who had bone shrapnel of other victims removed from his body, arose and loudly explained:
“You’re a f . . king dog, mate, you are going to die, you f . . k.”
Tim Blair has started a fund to buy Mr. Ryan some beer to toast his eloquence. I have contributed. You should, too.
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So Representative Gephardt, in his Look at me! campaign for the Democrat nomination for president, briefly made his voice heard above the dim din of the other candidates by saying:
“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” Gephardt said.
Rachel Lucas was the first to go off on him, followed later by Professor Volokh, Andrew Sullivan, Professor Reynolds, and even ScrappleFace, leading to the normal blogomockratic firestorm.
Okay, so Il Dick would knock out at least one competing branch of government if he were elected president. I have good news, though, he won’t! He’s such a longshot candidate that he’s firing all of his guns at once and imploding in his space, or something along those lines.
Unlike Ms. Lucas, Prof. Volokh, Mr. Sullivan, Prof. Reynolds, and Mr. Face, I have had the privilege of voting against Dick Gephardt. When I lived in Attempted Casinoport, Missouri, that unincorporated area known colloquially as “Lemay,” I was in his district. Every two years, I got to vote for whatever Don QuiGOP candidate tilted at the Speaker of the House. The best protest votes I ever cast.
But I digress. When prompted to explain the statement by ABC’s The Note, Gephardt’s office said:
We asked the Gephardt campaign for a response.
“The fact that this question comes from libertarian law professors should speak for itself,” spokesman Erik Smith wrote in an e-mail. “Dick Gephardt knows the law. The president can not overturn a Supreme Court decision. That’s not what he said. He was simply expressing his commitment to diversity and his willingness to use the tools of his office to promote affirmative action programs to the fullest extent possible. It’s important to remember that Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the military.” [Emphasis mine]
So the response is that libertarians are whack jobs! Ad homenim! Of course, they’d hate to practice the politics of personal destruction, but since some people have begun taking the representative at his word, there will be hell to pay!
Fortunately, Dick Gephardt will return to citizen life soon, and by “citizen life” I mean “highly paid lobbyist life.”
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Back in May, I wrote about a young man here in Missouri who got caught videotaping the girls locker room. Lucky thing for him, he didn’t do it in New York, where Gov Pattycakes just signed a law making video voyeurism a felony.
Not only that, but if you record a someone unclothed in a bedroom against her (let’s be honest, it’s always gonna be a her) will, you get added to the state’s registry of sex offenders as though you were a serial molester of Webelos.
Ask me sometime and I will go on at length about the legislative insanity that assigns felony to minor offenses that cause no physical harm or threat. It’s easy to do something! about a perceived problem by getting tough, but it’s another thing entirely to continue to warehouse non-violent offenders for years on end.
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Researchers once again provide a handy rationalization for me: napping is good for you.
My crack feline team, particularly Dominique and Aurora, has often acted as an experiment group by sleeping upon my lap as I spend an hour in the afternoon reclined and, er, working on my astral projection abilities. Typically, I close my eyes and project myself an hour into the future, refreshed and ready for a night of chores or blogging.
Now that napping, too, has proven good for me, I am proud to add it to my daily regimen of healthy vices. Two cups of coffee, two drinks of alcohol, and a nap, and I will live forever.
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According to a recent survey (alluded to by Fark), two thirds of Americans cannot name a single Supreme Court Justice.
I could, off the top of my head (and without using the Internet) could name 6: Rehnquist, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas. Smarter-than-thou colleague Adam could name seven, but he missed Stevens and Kennedy. Neener neener neener!
Which reminded me of a set of questions with which I would strike out at coworkers and associates back when I was a young man. The one that particularly flummoxed fellow English majors who attended the same Jesuit university I did was Name six morals.. Crikey, the biblical book of Exodus quite famously contains ten. I wasn’t even asking for moral to which the answerer adhered. Just give me six. Many could not.
The other great fun one was “When was the Civil War fought?” Ikes, the years I received as an answer. 1910 was the best (worse) answer I got. Seven years before World War I. Of course, the respondent wouldn’t have known that, either.
Undoubtedly you, gentle blog reader, are better steeped in civics than printers (those who run printing presses), so I expect you could name at least six Supreme Court Justices (because this very entry names seven). However, feel free to challenge your pub mates, and to name their senators and congressional representative, as well as governor, state assembly rep, state senator, mayor, and alderman.
Perhaps if we can shame them through pub bets it will increase their civics knowledge. Or at least get us free delicious Guinness Draughts when we win the bet.
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Mapchic likes V and V: The Final Battle.
This news, about a new movie that carries on where the others, and presumably V: The Series, left off, should cheer her.
Robert Englund recently said that he’d be remembered forever as Freddy, but we’ll always remember you as Willie, the vegetarian visitor, Robert. You’re a geek icon.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reprinting a Knight Ridder Newspapers syndication about how to enter the IT world by learning a little geek speak.
Words like PEBKAC? Nagware? OS? LAN? Intranet? Firewall?
Drop those in your job interview, you little punk, and we’ll know your certs were vaporware. Get back to AOL where it’s safe. Before you do, please confirm your credit card number below.
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He might have been a Democrat. He worked a little too closely with a female member of his staff. But Mayor John Norquist did wonders for the city of Milwaukee, singlehandedly revitalizing the downtown with his New Urbanist zeal. His time in office is ending.
I remember Milwaukee being pretty dead downtown when I started college in 1990, about two years into his first term as mayor. Now, when I go back, people live downtown, and not just the homeless. The city’s nightlife has spread southward from the East Side so that nightclubs are open in the heart of downtown. Condos are going up by the lake. Apartment complexes have sprouted on Wisconsin Avenue. And there are people.
Kind of a shame that St. Louis, a city whose metropolitan area boasts a larger population than Milwaukee, continues its corrupt morass and stunted revitalization efforts. If Norquist wanted to come down and run for mayor of St. Louis, I’d vote for him.
What, you say, but Brian J., you live in Casinoport. How can you vote for the mayor of St. Louis?
Well, being a living, breathing resident of St. Louis is not exactly required to vote in St. Louis.
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Fred Kaplan, of Slate, elucidates on the MDA’s recent missile test. He says it’s laughable that the interceptor could have missed and the test succeeded. His ignorance shows, but professional writers, and by professional writers I mean “all other professional writers except me,” don’t have to know much about the real world to pund.
I’ve gone on about this missile test before, and I am too bored to go over it again. I’ll let John J. Miller handle Kaplan.
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Less than a week after a Florida boy is killed by an alligator, a Florida man is fined for possession of an alligator because he lassoed it and detained it as it approached a woman and two small children.
The guy, who was driving, stopped and lassoed the reptile as it approached the potential victims. He then dragged it away from the wimmen and chillen and waited for the authorities to show up. When they did, they promptly wrote him a citation, made him cut the rope, and then called a trapper to come catch the animal.
Jeb, what is going on in your state?
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Since I know I am The Formerly Blue Haired Guy‘s source for Jewel information, I must point him to a revealing admission about her affinity for the long guns on Instapundit.
Easy, honey! I am doing it for Hans!
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Quick! Someone stop that racoon, it’s stolen Cyndi Lauper’s song “I Drove All Night”!
Wait a minute! That’s not a racoon! It’s Celine Dion in her Vegas eye makeup!
Unfortunately, she doesn’t realize that song belongs to Cyndi Lauper.
Put down the song, Celine, and raise your five-octave voice out of the range of human hearing.
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As some of you might know, I purchased the new album from Jewel Kilcher, 0304, when it came out three weeks ago. A member of my adoring public (which means if it ain’t you, it’s the other one) asked for a full review of it since I, after listening to it once or twice, gushed enough to convince him to buy it. He hasn’t spoken to me since. Let this be my apology.
Jewel’s got a new sound, as you have read elsewhere. Her other albums have been folksy, with her voice and subtle acoustic guitar giving her a subtle, breathy sexiness in her love songs (think “Morning Song”). When I first heard 0304, with its dance beats and a more confident sexuality in songs like “Leave the Light On”, “Sweet Temptation”, or “2 Become 1”, I thought, wow! It was something akin to seeing the little sister of your bestest buddy blossom from a cute kid into a woman.
Unfortunately, after a couple more listens, the song “Yes You Can” sticks in my head. The song’s a celebration of dance club/rave culture casual sex. Suddenly, it’s akin to seeing the little sister of your bestest buddy blossom from a cute kid into a woman who happens to be a prostitute. Ick.
Maybe prostitution’s a good analogy. After all, she’s changed her music and her image to target a demographic instead of trying to please her core audience with some expansion (Dr. Thomas to emergency, please; Dr. Thomas to emergency).
She’s sacrificed some of her other, more thoughtful songs about things aside from chasing members of the opposite sex. No “Hands”, no “Down So Long”, no “Who Will Save Your Soul” (her best song, period). The album changes pace (allowing listeners to recuperate for a minute and slam some ginseng and saw palmetto) with “America”, but I saw the same Songwrite-By-Numbers kit in K-Mart.
So I’m disappointed with the album, but it’s not all bad. Jewel can carry a playful dance number when she uses her manic voice. You know the one I am talking about. The less breathy (although still breathy), with clear, aggressive notes (“Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Hands”). When she tries to mesh her plaintive voice (“Adrian”) into the bubbles of notes and backbeat, it fails. Fortunately, she stays away from the bleats. After all, the albums all about coming together for a night, not breaking up badly.
I give it a two of four whatevers, and I am disappointed because I expect a little more from Jewel. I listened to Pieces of You over and over again, for crying out loud. I hope it’s only a departure, as do many of the reviewers on Amazon. I guess it will depend upon whether her new audience is bigger than her old audience.
UPDATE:
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Maybe it’s not a good gamble to demand renegotiation on your recording contract, threaten to return to Australian serials, and hold your breath for more money since you’re a big star based on your 1998 album Left of the Middle and your two hits, “Torn” and “Wishing I Was There.”
It might be more of a bluff than you think, and if they call you on it, your career might be in real trouble.
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Obviously the FBI has some time to get music swappers.
After all, when smart constraints remain on federal law enforcement of civil offenses, the terrorists will have won!
(Pointer from Techdirt.)
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Brian’s plog–paper log, aka “journal” (because boys don’t keep diaries)–entry for January 5, 1989:
I just heard on the radio that it’s two weeks until Reagan leaves office. I have been an admirer of his and true to Dean (Theologian’s) [a BBS friend, you damn Internet era whippersnappers] prediction, I have a Reagan-[George H.W.] Bush picture over my mirror. I sincerely hope Bush can handle the country, especially with the new Libyan pressures–the two jets downed yesterday and all [story].
I wrote my secret pal yesterday & she ought to get it today. That’s only my third for the year. The Honor Society Hit Squad oughta get me.
Up to 50 degrees today! Gawd! It’s only January! We need some snow for snowdays.
Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!
Yessir, I am easily influenced by what I read, and the Henry Reed series of books (read much earlier than my junior year in high school, thank you very much–as I recall, my tastes around then were fairly heavy into mystery, as my essay “Meeting Robert B. Parker” attests). I started journaling several times in high school, and this particular stretch (my junior year) captures some political thoughts. The remainder is daily life in high school.
Which is why I appreciated my visit to Jared Myers’ PolitiBlog. It’s got a conservative political bent, but exposed in the life of a high school student. It’s the journal entries I would write today, were I short of a score of years.
Oh, yeah, and Wednesday is Hot Conservative Chick Day.
Except he’s forgotten the hot Libertarian-esque babes Heather, Rachel Lucas, and Virginia Postrel. Or maybe he just hasn’t gotten to them yet.
(Link seen on InstaPundit.)
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Oh, and check out the Boolean construction in his criteria for a fillibuster. It’s not really clear. He’ll fillibuster a candidate who
((would turn back the clock on a woman’s right to choose OR would turn back the clock the constitutional right to privacy OR (would turn back the clock on civil rights AND individual liberties)) AND would turn back the clock on the laws protecting workers) AND would turn back the clock on the environment
That’s a pretty convoluted criteria, and a pretty tough one to meet. I reckon no candidate would, which means Kerry’s algorithmic condition will never be met. No fillibuster(String supremeCourtNominee) method call at all!
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Drudge has pointed to a story in which Senator John Kerry, in which the Vietnam veteran claims:
“I am prepared to filibuster, if necessary, any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on a woman’s right to choose or the constitutional right to privacy, on civil rights and individual liberties and on the laws protecting workers and the environment,” Kerry said in remarks via satellite at a meeting of Democratic party officials in St. Paul, Minn.
As you know, Senator Kerry’s full-time job these days is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. This requires nationwide, or at lease extra-DC, schmoozing, gladhanding, speechifying, and fundraising–all things you cannot do while not yielding the Senate floor.
Hence, I can only infer that he is planning to unleash an android replica of himself to do one or the other since he cannot be in all those places at the same time.
I just threw in the evil part because it makes the copy snappier. We all know Senator Kerry is not truly evil, just misguided.
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Another suburb of Milwaukee is suffering from a shortage of Paxil. Residents in Cerdarburg have created a petition complaining that the colors of playground equipment are too colorful.
If it’s not the color of a duck blind, suburban Milwaukee communities don’t want it. Heaven forbid their property values not rise as quickly as the next drab suburb over.
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In Florida, a group of kids were swimming in a river even though they could see alligators nearby all day. Of course, when they saw the alligators, they got out of the water. Except for the toughest of the bunch, who might have been trying to prove his bravery. It didn’t work out for him.
Do you think we’ll get a summer of Alligator Attack! hype from this?
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