May 11
Real estate developer Hugh Cummings of Burlington North Carolina was a generous man and a benefactor to his community. But when he built the strip mall that bears his name, he was a little too stingy on the sign:
May 11
May 10
Mike, you’ll be interested to know that I just killed the last wisteria vine in my yard, the Elder God of vines, one so old that it obviously predates the construction of my house. One so old that it had practically become a part of the terrain. It is, conservatively estimating, fifty feet tall. It is so thick that I wasn’t able to use pruning shears against it. I had to use a saw.
I’d intended to provide a photo of the vine on posting this, but my camera is apparently with my wife, who’s attending some function at Duke. When she returns, I’ll update.
May 09
Spudslinging
Posted by David.Geekery, Humor, Language, Law, Politics & Current Events, Things that irk me No Comments »
Everyone has a mental-verbal lapse now and then. Sleep-deprived candidates running on empty or arugula seem particularly likely to suffer from them. That’s why I tend to cut McCain some slack when he misspeaks, rather than join the harping about his age. That’s also why I’m inclined to cut Obama some slack when he does likewise, rather than pretend the slip is less meaningless than I actually take it to be.
That’s why it’s absurd that Hinderaker tries to make heavy weather over so much nothing:
This is much worse than anything Dan Quayle ever did. Needless to say, these bizarre moments won’t be promoted by the media as evidence that Obama is stupid.
No– no, it’s not ‘much worse than anything Dan Quayle ever did.’ Obama, referring to his travels in the contiguous states, accidentally said “fifty-seven” rather than “forty-seven” while discussing his impending trip to the forty-eighth. Big whoop. And what did Quayle’s brain/tongue nexus achieve?
- “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” (Referring the the United Negro College Fund’s slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”…)
- “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.”
- “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.”
- “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”
- “We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”
- “For NASA, space is still a high priority.”
- “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”
And so on and so Danforth, seemingly ad infinauseam. But Hinderaker decides that a slip in the tens place is worse than serial malapropism? And Instapundit picks it up without noting the speciousness of the comparison? Sorry, John and Glenn– there’s no comparison, and it’s irksome to force one.
May 09
We’ve written a number of times about the travails that Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn face before Canada’s Human Rights Commissions, a set of administrative barely-courts whose primary purpose seems to be to punish Canadians for speaking political opinions deemed unacceptable in certain circles of the multi-culti left. We’d never have heard of Levant, and probably wouldn’t read Steyn, both of whom have opinions with which we disagree about Muslims in Canada and around the world, but for these prosecutions which seem to be designed solely to punish speech. We’d ignore them, but we’re now reluctantly fans of both.
The Arab American News writes:
Runner-up [for Canada’s Tenth Annual Press Freedom Awards] was Mark Steyn, who was nominated by Maclean’s for his article in their magazine, “The Future Belongs to Islam.” The Canadian Islamic Congress brought charges against Maclean’s in various human rights commissions across Canada, claiming that the article constitutes a hate crime. The second place acknowledgement by the Committee serves to illustrate the self-defeating nature of the complaint, which has given Maclean’s, the article, and Steyn publicity which they ill deserve.
Tens of thousands of people have read of Levant, now famous for his publication of the banned Danish Muhammad cartoons, and Steyn, a prominent journalist in Canada, Britain, and presumably other podunk countries, who’d never have heard of either had they not been sued for speaking their minds.
The Arab American News probably disagrees with Levant and Steyn more than we do, but we agree with their editorial on the importance of speech and the ridiculousness of those who use legal process to censor it. If someone is hateful or merely wrong, criticize, mock, or just ignore what he has to say. Beat him in the realm of ideas.
But if you sue or censor, you’ll make him a martyr, and spread his message more effectively than he ever could.
May 09
Make no mistake, Linden Labs’ Second Life is a godawfully sad excuse for a game. It’s not fun. There’s nothing to do except wank off in time with other virtual furries. The interface is a joke. And the people who claim to enjoy it are losers, even by the standards of mmog players. It’s like the Something Awful forum, except you don’t have to pay for it.
But this collection of perverts, credit card scammers, libertarians living in mom’s basement, sociologists writing about the journalists they meet, and journalists writing about the sociologists they meet does produce some interesting articles on the extent to which human dysfunction can be carried on the web. Among the dysfunctional journalists, no one covers this wretched hive better than former Salon/current Reason games reviewer Wagner James Au, who unlike his fellow Second Life players at the AP, New York Times, Washington Post, et. al. actually knows and enjoys computer games.
Since it appears Au left Salon in favor of Reason in part for political reasons (his writing always seems happier spread between libertarian airheads than it seemed when the stuffed up liberal douches of Salon had him in their ghetto), you can imagine his horror on finding that the virtual New Hampshire that was Second Life is becoming an online Vermont. Yes, Second Life is embracing regulation.
Well worth reading.
May 09
NBC has an upcoming program called “America’s Favorite Mom”:
Teleflora presents America’s Favorite Mom,” an NBC prime-time television event hosted by Donny and Marie Osmond. In addition, there will be special cameo appearances by Christina Aguilera, Tony Hawk, Alicia Keys, Hulk Hogan, Naomi Judd, Amy Poehler, music by the Dey (www.thedey.com) and more throughout the broadcast. At the end of the special, the Osmonds will crown one lucky winner, “America’s Favorite Mom.”
I’d rather de-grout a prison camp shower stall with my tongue than watch that. But in addition to being an aesthetic abomination akin to Hallmark throwing up on a collection of Hummel figurines, its producers are also assholes about adoption.
May 09
This post is intended to act as a sort of sonar ping into the web rather than to provide substantive information, but members of the Octopus Overlords forum and community who are interested in its fate should visit the site. It isn’t back up yet, but there is an update on the front page which is highly encouraging of a return to operation in a very short time. It appears Rip has resolved his server problems, and only database transfer remains.
More encouraging news comes from Zack in our forum, who had sites with the same provider. Zack informs us that both of his sites are back online.
May 09
I was digging through my personal files in the office and found a clipping of the best obituary I’ll ever read. This notice was printed in the Daily Item of Lewisburg PA on February 7 2004. It concerns Mr. Louis Casimir Jr., of the same town. I was given a copy shortly after this was printed because my wife is friends with Mr. Casimir’s daughter. I understand that an abbreviated version of Mr. Casimir’s obituary was read over the air on Car Talk.
May 09
On the matter of graphical representations of quantitative data, the New York Times offers a nice example today: Mapping the Human Diseasome.
May 09
Those of us who enjoyed “Bloom County” in the 1980s might remember the series in which Opus was condemned and expelled from the community as a perpetrator of penguin lust.
Truth is stranger, and ultimately more pathetic, than comics.
May 09
Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson, one of the most powerful members of the state Republican Party, is promoting her state in some awfully strange corners of the world.
Johnson established she’s battier than a vampire convention, stating that, “I’ve been a conspiratoriast [sic] for a long, long time,” and that when 9/11 happened, she “questioned immediately — is this another false flag [operation] like the Reichstag [fire]?”…
“When you’ve got a cabal at the head of our country,” she told Jones, “and has been there for years pulling the strings behind the scenes, I mean, whatever it takes to get what they want is what they do.”
“Jones” in the quote above refers to wingnut crank radio host Alex Jones, whose show Johnson visited as a guest. Now, we overuse the terms “wingnut” and “crank” here, I’ll be the first to admit. But Alex Jones, who has done more to promote the notion that the September 11 2001 attacks were an “inside job” perpetrated by a shadowy “new world order” than almost anyone, defines the terms. And a few others including “moonbat,” “vicious anti-semitic ZOG promoting scumbag,” and “dangerous freak.”
911 inside job gospel comes in two flavors: Either the Bush Administration did it, or the Jews did it. I assume that Senator Johnson, a good Republican herself, doesn’t mean George Bush when she refers to a shadowy cabal. Which leaves the Jews. But the quoted statement is so vague that’s just an assumption.
Perhaps Senator Johnson could enlighten her constituents at the next meeting of the Senate Committee on K-12 Education, which she chairs.
May 09
This morning NPR played an interesting story on the non-confrontational approaches Arizona and Utah are taking with respect to the polygamous Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Church, who have been the subject of frontier justice in Texas. Ordinarily I wouldn’t write about this, because I don’t care about The Children, but I’m a sucker for jackbooted thugs in uniform.
Mojave County Arizona supervisor Buster Johnson was kind enough to share the following legal advice with his consituents, the attorneys general of Arizona and Utah, and the rest of the world:
I think they should go into all these polygamous communities and you go up there,” said Buster Johnson, a county supervisor in Mojave County, the Arizona home of the FLDS. “Because you have the probable cause from Texas to say that the