CNN had a colloquium on Why They Hate us; mercifully it is not on their web site.
The wrong question is being asked. Why do we hate them? Because they blow up little children? Because they blow up pizzerias? No, because they are evil scum-sucking fiendish murderers! That's my reason, anyway.
I got this from the free Jewish paper, the Jewish Standard (NO LINK)
Sidney and Ruth Lobonowitz will celebrate their silver anniversary this year, a milestone in in marriage, but especially remarkable considering that the groom was 75 years old when he made this second marriage.
IT seems almost obscene, given the expanses of midriff, thigh and backside that too many people are all too willing to bare today, that the decision to show a little ankle with dress shoes should raise eyebrows. But almost obscene is just how it seems to many. (From the NyTimes, link defunct.)
[I]f I see something interesting in a magazine, I'll fold the page so I can get back to it later. Do I ever get back to it? NO. I wind up investigating the folds when I’m ready to move and can’t bring myself to pack 3 boxes of magafuckingzines.
Which is why I’m currently surrounded by a metric assload of random publications, each with tiny folds marking pages containing...something. As an equal opportunity folder, I usually can’t even figure out why I folded the page in the first place. Meaning, I may have folded the page for any of the following reasons:
A.) I liked a cute silver jacket that I’ll be able to wear when I lose 900 pounds or revert to my original embryonic state.
B.) I couldn’t believe that Burberry made flowered bicycle shorts.
C.) I liked a CD review and wanted to hear it on Amazon before I ordered it from the library. (If I don’t check them out, they will suck ass and not sound anything like their description, and embarrass me in front of Mateo, whom I’m still desperately trying to trick into thinking I’m cool).
D.) I wanted to clip some smartypants article and send it to someone. Who? Beats me.
E.) I bought the magazine in the supermarket and decided I’d rather stare wistfully at the Crème de Mer bottle in the privacy of my own home, where I can weep and no one will see my mascara run.
[R]ead Lawrence H. Silberman's column in OpinionJournal:
Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president [Lyndon Johnson] was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.
Yes, that Bill Moyers.
Britain didn’t just give the world industrialisation, but the belief in economic and political liberty, in free markets and democracy, leading to the modern world’s unprecedented affluence and freedom. Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill won the arguments, and Britain’s global influence spread them. Britain didn’t invent democracy, but matured it over centuries and ensured that it became dominant.
Britain’s greatest creations are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all stable, affluent, successful liberal democracies which have for more than a century been a magnet to the rest of the world. No other European country ever managed such an achievement. All stayed free of the tyrannies of fascism, communism and military dictatorship that benighted almost everywhere else. In the dark days of the second world war, Britain and its former colonies were just about the only democracies in existence; now democracy embraces much of humanity. Of the G8 countries, all but Russia (and arguably even she) owe their current status as free-market democracies to Britain and its former colonies. The English-speaking economies amount to more thBan a third of world GDP.
With just 1 per cent of the world’s population, Britain has united the world with a truly global language, allowing people to speak unto people for the first time in history (French was little more than a language for elites). These islands make up less than a fifth of 1 per cent of the world’s land area, and yet their capital dictates to the rest of the world its time zones and degrees of east and west.
.... Curly haired people simply cannot live in humid environments and keep any semblence of self respect. None. I am single handedly putting the children of the heirs to the Sebastian Hair Product line through college with my myriad assortment of anti-frizz formulas at this point. Think red-headed and very white Tina Turner. Early 80's frizz Cher (once again with red hair).
Isabel Button disses New Jersey, home of baked ziti and the cannoli:
In New Jersey, mosquitos have their own lobby...
New frontiers in dress design:
With Mollycoddle, Christine Liu wanted to explore the relationship that people have with their clothes.
Mollycoddle is a dress with a hunger for love and attention. Its wearer needs the dress for obvious (coverage) or nonobvious (personal) reasons, and in turn, the dress needs the wearer. Mollycoddle wants to be touched and caressed by the wearer on a semi-regular basis, but it can be happy being touched by other people, too....
If the dress doesnt get loved enough, it gets needier and starts squeezing the wearer, begging for a touch or two. It will send vibrations as well. First it's a little huggy-plead which gets more aggressive with time. If its begging is ignored the thing will squeeze you to, ostensibly, death.
Christine Liu explained that "the touch part works, the squeeze part is still ongoing. i would like to have a corset-like frame in there to do that, but for the current prototype i have some naggy pager motors in there for vibrations along the kidneys and a tie-around necklace with its ends connected to some motors for squeezes around the neck. i didnt want to kill anyone in the construction of this thing, so i'm treading carefully."
What an embarassing moment. Like Tom Sawyer, Roberts got to hear his eulogy. Unlike Tom, all eyes were on him and he looked distinctly uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the camera. The poor man didn't seem to know whether to look up or down.
The whole thing was hokey and slightly embarassing.
Yahoo news reports:
Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote Hadley, who has since risen to the top job of national security adviser.
"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."
Frederick Jones, a spokesman for Hadley, said Friday he could not comment due to the continuing criminal investigation. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances. He said Rove never invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or Bush's executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides.
Rove, Bush's closest adviser, told a grand jury the e-mail was consistent with his recollection that his intention in talking with Cooper wasn't to divulge Plame's identity but to caution the reporter against certain allegations Plame's husband was making, according to legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony.
They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury investigation.
Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that Novak was planning an article about Plame and Wilson in his column, the legal sources said.
Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet was about to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question some of Wilson's assertions, the sources said.
Today, I learned about Frogs, and how they throw up. Oddly enough, this is one thing about frogs that I have never deeply pondered. You would think that 'How Frogs Puke' would have been right up there on my list, but no.
Apparently, most frogs can intentionally vomit up their entire stomachs, and then use their front legs to shove the offending matter out. Then they simply re-swallow their stomachs and continue on their merry way. No muss, no fuss.
Consider the situation in the West only 319 years ago. In 1683, the armies of the Ottoman Turks were laying siege to Vienna. Vienna, in the center of Europe, nearly fell to the Turks. It was Jan Sobieski and his Polish cavalry who helped to break the siege of Vienna and preserve the West.
Via red state rant:
James Lewis analyzes the Plame Blame Game:
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
I recently attended a performance at the Berkshire Theater Festival of The Father by Strindberg, very, very serious stuff. Swedish angst. Ingmar Bergman live, so to speak. Then why was the audience laughing so much?
A husband and wife hate each other--so far, so good. The main object of their power struggle is the education of their adolescent daughter. Is she to go to town or stay at home? Husband's monologue: all these women in the house are driving me crazy. Much tearing of hair and chewing of scenery, accompanied by stifled giggles from the audience, who are trying to behave. H complains that he keeps writing to his bookseller and ordering books but does not recieve them. Intercepts letter from bookseller announcing that wife has countermanded his orders. More dire pronouncements about women. More giggling, not so stifled this time, by audience.
Wife enters. Not much sympathy for her, as she looks and acts like Cruella deVil, or better yet, the evil stepmother in Snow White.
A spirit,(of what?) so far visible only through a scrim, brings a lantern and hangs it up, and puts a letter on the desk. Contents of letter never revealed, but wife sees it and dramatically tears it up, uttering hysterical cry. There's also a doddering old nurse with osteoporosis who intrudes now and then, dodders a bit, and wrings her hands.
In monologue, wife hatches plot to drive husband crazy. Plot works instantly. H throws lantern at her. He goes nuts, falls on floor, doctor announces he has had a stroke. Curtain falls, to roars from audience which has by now lost all inhibition.
These fun-loving Swedes!
It's well known that Strindberg went nuts a number of times. He also had three wives but could never get it right. Even in his most normal moments, I doubt he was much fun to be around.
Democrats try to win the war of ideas, with Paul Begala as the resident philosopher:
Begala... declared that Republicans had "done a p***-poor job of defending" the U.S.
Republicans, he said, "want to kill us."
"I was driving past the Pentagon when that plane hit" on Sept. 11, 2001. "I had friends on that plane; this is deadly serious to me," Begala said.
"They want to kill me and my children if they can. But if they just kill me and not my children, they want my children to be comforted -- that while they didn't protect me because they cut my taxes, my children won't have to pay any money on the money they inherit," Begala said. "That is bulls*** national defense, and we should say tha
t."
I finally bought myself a rechargeable Oral-B toothbrush. It came in a blister pack the size of a book. I've never seen an actual blister like that--it looked like a boil from hell on steroids.
I attempted to liberate the brush from the monster blister. They showed an illustration of a scissors on the package, so I didn't waste time trying to rip it apart with my bare hands. The packaging made short work of the scissors, which will never cut again. So I got a steak knife. No go. Okay, I'm smarter than the anti-Semitic (Braun is a German company) fiends who designed this thing. I went for my best Cutco knife, the one sold me for $60 by my neighbor's son to work his way through college.
After almost sacrificing a finger or two, I managed to cut it partway open so I could reach in and grab the toothbrush part. But the rest was in a cardboard box, deep inside. More sawing. I finally got the box and was attempting to mate the toothbrushing thingy with the charging thingy, when a bunch of screws fell out on my lap.
You have to assemble the damn thing yourself.
Whatever the blister pack is made of, they should use it to armor our troops in Iraq.
Airport Security's Grand Illusion
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A25
If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security -- looking repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will miss the plane -- here's something to make you feel worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing is making you safer, at least not to any statistically significant or economically rational degree. Certainly any logical analysis of the money that has been spent on the airport security system since Sept. 11, 2001, and the security that the system has created, must lead to that conclusion.
[]
...99.992 percent of intercepted items were nail scissors, cigarette lighters, penknives and the like.
Yet this mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers around $5.5 billion -- just about the same price as the entire FBI -- a figure that doesn't include the cost of wasted time. []There has also been a price to pay in waste, since when that much money is rubbed into a problem with that kind of speed -- remember, the TSA had only 13 employees in January 2002 -- a lot of it gets misspent. In the case of the TSA, that waste includes $350,000 for a gym, $500,000 for artwork and silk plants at the agency's new operations center, and $461,000 for its first-birthday party. More to the point, the agency has spent millions, even billions, on technology that is inappropriate or outdated.
In fact, better security didn't have to cost that much. Probably the most significant measure taken in the past four years was one funded not by the government but by the airline industry, which put bulletproof doors on its cockpits at the relatively low price of $300 million to $500 million over 10 years. In extremely blunt terms, that means that while it may still be possible to blow up a plane (and murder 150 people), it is now virtually impossible to drive a plane into an office building (and murder thousands). By even the crudest cost-benefit risk analysis, bulletproof cockpit doors, which nobody notices, have the potential to save far more lives, at a far lower cost per life, than the screeners who open your child's backpack and your grandmother's purse while you stand around in your socks waiting for them to finish.
But, then, this isn't a country that has ever been good at risk analysis. If it were, we would never have invented the TSA at all. Instead, we would have taken that $5.5 billion, doubled the FBI's budget, and set up a questioning system that identifies potentially suspicious passengers, as the Israelis do. Even now, it's not too late to abolish the TSA, create a federal training program for airport screeners, and then let private companies worry about how many people to hire, which technology to buy and how long the tables in front of the X-ray machines should be (that last issue being featured in a recent government report). But every time that suggestion is made in Congress, someone denounces the plan as a "privatization" of our security and a sellout.
...Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign.
Miss Rachel has saddled me with another meme. What historical moments would I have liked to be present at?
I only want to be present at historical moments where I am rich, famous, beautiful, and eating good food. Also, surrounded by fawning fans. Thus, I would like to have been present at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, but definitely not as a serving maid or varlet or even the person in charge of decorations.
Okay, seriously: I would love to be present in Dr. Johnson's time, hanging out in the coffee house while Johnson made witty remarks and Boswell sat at his knee, taking it all down. I would love to have been present when he said, "A man who is tired of London is tired of life." My sentiments exactly.
I would love to have been present in Paris between the wars, as a rich young expatriate, preferably a talented one. They all seemed to have such a good time.
I would like to have been present for the opening concert at Carnegie Hall. Good seats, please.
I would like to have been present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
I would like to have seen General Lee surrender his sword to General Grant at the courthouse at Appomatox, VA. I also wish I could be sure I spelled it right. It looks funny to me.
I would like to have lived in the Gilded Age as an ostentaneous nouveau riche who knew how to throw money around and wore lots of jewels.
I would love to have heard Disraeli make a speech in Parliament when he was Prime Minister.
I would love to have been in Vienna when Mozart conducted one of his own symphonies. Or when Mahler conducted one of his.
Am I allowed to go into the future? I would like to be present when all the terrorists had been hounded to death and peace ruled the world.
Okay, Matt, take it from there.
I announced the other day that I would be posting at bnn.net. What do you know, the site is down! Maybe if I joined Al Queda, they would go out of business?
In the decadent Eastern State where I now live, people refer to some people's mode of dressing as "Full Cleveland" or "half Cleveland." Neither is meant to be a compliment. I guess another word for it would be "hick," "rube," or possibly "rustic."
Let me give you an example. We once went to a function where a guy at my table wore a pink sports jacket, white shirt with pink design, pink tie, white pants, white patent leather shoes, and pink socks. He was a glorious specimen in all his pinkhood or pinkitude. A half Cleveland would wear an ordinary shirt, a golf shirt maybe, with bright red or green pants, a wbite patent leather belt, and white patent leather loafers, no socks.
I saw one of these at a reunion I attended at my Alma Mater. I pointed him out and whispered, "half Cleveland." My friend didn't get it. I tried to explain but came off sounding very lame. She looked somewhat put out.
She was from Cleveland. "What does everyone dump on Cleveland for?" she asked plaintively.
I apologized--that was very crude. Clevelanders are fine folks. From now on, I will refer to "half Buffalo" and "full Buffalo." I don't know anyone from Buffalo.
Martin Vander Weyer hauls out unstylish old clothes:
I have been involved, secretively, in a significant challenge of my own: to lose a stone and a half in 12 weeks. After a succession of big lunches on the slopes in March, my annual skiing party decided collectively that we had run to flab, and one friend came up with a scheme to raise money for the British Ski Club for the Disabled by each achieving specified weight-loss targets. Remarkably, we all did it, and our heaviest contestant, a very big boy indeed, shed an awesome 36lbs on a regime of brown rice, oily fish and industrial muesli. The boring thing about dieting is talking about it — hence the secretiveness — but the pleasing thing is that it makes available eras of wardrobe that you never thought you would visit again. I’m already back in my 1987 cream linen suit, and if I keep going I can see some wicked batik shirts and flared trousers at the end of the rail.
I just joined bnn. Here is my bio which appears on their author's list:
Miriam... blogs at miriam's ideas. A recovering librarian and one-book author, Miriam has the distinction of being the first blogger to post about blogging naked (or nekkid, if you prefer). The idea was seized upon by Matthew Peek, who gave her her 15 minutes of fame, plus lots of visits from porn sites. These visitors were disappointed. Nothing going on here, folks, move on!
Miriam likes to write about politics, libraries, books, and the craziness (mishugas) of American politicians, who, if they had to earn a living, would surely starve.Also writes about Israeli politics when she can figure out what the hell is going on.Supports our troops, their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and wives and husbands and their cousins and their sisters and their aunts.
Be sure to read me over there. There are other people blogging there who are good, too.
As a kid, I read to escape a less-than-optimum life. Reading under the covers at night, hoping the nuns couldn’t see the flashlight, I’d covered all the Nancy Drew books by the time I was eight. Ruined my eyesight in the process.
Read-a-holics cannot resist the printed word: It starts with cereal boxes at the breakfast table or newspapers abandoned in the restaurant booth by whomever ate there before you and continues into reading your high school English lit books the day you get them. This is not virtue. A therapist once posed the question: “so when did you discover that books were a neurotic escape?”
Motto: never leave home without a book. You never know when you might be trapped somewhere with nothing to read. Horrors.
There are two kinds of drivers in New Jersey--the quick and the dead.
An example of the quick: the guy who, while driving in the far left lane, decides he needs to get off the highway right away and cuts horizontally in front of three cars in the right hand lanes in order to make his getaway. Or the fellow who threads his way like a needle, in and out of lanes on the Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway, generally without using his turn signals.
These people are usually young, and usually male. But when they hit 65 (years, not miles) they suddenly start wearing old guy hats and driving in the left lane at 22 miles an hour with their right blinker flashing on and off. They only give up this position when the driver behind them decides to pass on the right. These are the dead.
I've carried a box cutter for a long time, even before 9/11. I found it handy to open things, like packets of crackers and small things, like a box of pins, which come mounted on a large card with a blister pack.
After September 11, I realized that box-cutters were a big no-no, so reminded myself to take the damn thing out of my purse and stow it somewhere.
Somehow, in all the excitement, I forgot. It was only when I was in Rome, rummaging in my purse for a tissue or something, that I encountered my box-cutter. It had gone through airport security without a hitch.
I can only figure that it must be made of kryptonite.
From the Telegraph:
I'm not 'devout', that's why I'm an Anglican
By Quentin Letts
(Filed: 03/07/2005)
Last Sunday 150,000 people went to Glastonbury, la-la'd about love and peace, heard a sermon (from Bishop Geldof) and were given hours of airtime by the BBC. Also last Sunday, up and down this bruised old land of ours, at least eight times that many souls quietly entered Anglican churches and dropped to their knees, as they do every week of every year.
....
Loose-shirted formulators of fashion do not think much of the Church. That is, they neither approve of it nor do they afford it much thought. It has been this way for perhaps 25 years....
[I]t is time we realised how lucky we are in our official Church. It is time our vicars were thanked for their good works, their stoicism and their general lack of hysterics....
I go along every week primarily because I love singing hymns. There's little to beat a good blast of Praise My Soul or the Cathedral Psalter setting of the Te Deum before lunch. I suppose I also go because I love the Book of Common Prayer, which the churches in our part of Herefordshire still use, and because I want Cranmer's cadences to drip into my children's minds. This is partly a cultural thing, partly aesthetic. Religion is there, too, in the background, but I would not dare claim to understand or believe fully in every part of the liturgy.
Churchgoing is a communal affair. I don't meant that sign of the peace nonsense, which makes me feel awkward, but the sense of slow-burn fellowship that can develop with one's fellow parishioners. A pressure group was recently sniffy about how some parishes are now little more than "clubs" for their congregations. What's wrong with that? "Clubs" (a Bad Thing in 21st century-speak) are no more than another way of saying "strong communities" (Good Thing).
I go to church for the smell of the flagstones, the Rizla rustle of the Bible, the flicker of candles, the shiver of pride when the priest blesses our youngsters, the taste of the fortified wine and the sense of completeness when returning to one's pew after Communion. All these things say "Sunday" to my body and my being. In a world so full of false prophets, they help guy the week to something solid. And then comes the moment when the service is over, when the children can dash into the graveyard and skip around tombstones. It is something I did as a child and I am glad my children do it, too. It lends harmony to the chime of passing years....
Critics often accuse the Church, particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury, of failing to show moral leadership. They say that today's Anglican clergy are weak. Archbishop Rowan is mocked not only for his beard but also for failing to froth like some fundamentalist mullah.
I prefer it this way. Maybe this is a very English and Protestant thing, but I want my relationship with God, if it exists, to be a private thing. I don't so much want to be told what to believe as to be shown how. Rowan Williams seems rather gently brilliant at that.
His stance on sexuality, tolerant but discreet, suits the age. In our area last year we welcomed a new curate, a jovial, big-haired woman who spoke up well in the pulpit and seemed a thoroughly good egg. Then a national newspaper reported, excitedly, that our new curate had started life as a man. I half expected the parish to be outraged but quite the reverse happened. Nonchalance is but another way of saying tolerance, and tolerance is a proper Christian characteristic. That's what happened.
Our curate, with her rich tenor singing voice, is exceedingly popular and is soon to be ordained. (A traditionalist friend of mine opposed to female vicars, meanwhile, is still trying to work out whether or not it is doctrinally OK for him to take communion from her.)
Fire and brimstone is still there in the Book of Common Prayer, should your taste run to that sort of thing. "Cursed are the unmerciful, fornicators and adulterers, covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards and extortioners," growls a commination just before the Psalms.
To this the response, if not "Amen", is either "blimey", or a mumbled, "now you put it like that, Lord, is there any chance you could perhaps please have mercy on our fragile, flawed beings?" None of us, not even our priests or archbishops, is perfect. But I reckon the dear old Church of England is a fine and forgiving institution, and way less feeble than strangers and critics presume.
By way of Powerline:
Prisoners of the Soviets' Gulag Archipelago ate a few hundred calories a day, if they were lucky, mostly thin soup made of fishheads and the like. At Gitmo, detainees are given -- well, let's see . . . .
For breakfast: Pancakes, syrup, orange juice, fruit, milk, margarine, and coffee or tea. Or a whole-wheat bagel, oatmeal, juice, fruit, scrambled eggs, milk, margarine, and coffee or tea. Or whole-wheat bread, Raisin Bran, orange juice, fruit, milk, a "veggie patty," margarine, and coffee or tea.
For lunch: Whole-wheat pita, long-grain brown rice, canned peaches, steamed asparagus, northern beans, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or whole-wheat bread, tossed green rice, fresh fruit, wax beans, a seasoned beef patty, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or a whole-wheat bread slice, garlic mashed potatoes, canned pears, seasoned peas, kidney beans, margarine, and tea or drink-ade.
For dinner: Noodles Jefferson, a whole-wheat bread slice, fresh fruit, green beans, carrot sticks, baked chicken breast in broth, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or rice pilaf, whole-wheat pita, fresh fruit, steamed cauliflower, a veggie patty, margarine, and tea or drink-ade. Or whole-wheat bread, long-grain brown rice, fresh fruit, steamed carrots, broccoli or celery, lemon baked fish, margarine, and tea or drink-ade.
Other menu items include pineapple, okra, a beef patty with onions, succotash, black-eyed peas, Lyonnaise rice, spicy baked fish, bayou chicken breast, acorn squash, honey-glazed chicken, chickpeas, spinach, tandoori chicken, and mustard dill baked fish.
The daily caloric intake from the meals ranges from 2,500 to 2,900. Of course, the menus above represent just one 12-day cycle. Some detainees -- prisoners of the terror war -- have been held for years now.... Plus, all that margarine must be rough on the arteries.
So it's no wonder Senator Dick Durbin compared Gitmo with the gulag, Nazi death camps, and the killing fields of Cambodia. Rice pilaf again?
The horror.
But not before demonstrating her awesome psychic powers:
Madame Vasso
(Filed: 01/07/2005)
[]
Her book The Duchess of York - Uncensored (1996, co-written with the Daily Mirror journalist David Leigh), was based on tapes of confidential conversations over the six years when the Duchess had sought her advice and counsel. It presented her as an unhappy and foolish woman obsessed with sex, money and crystal balls. []
Mme Vasso's astonishing powers of prescience made her sense that her client was going through "a difficult stage" shortly after the Duchess told her that she was considering getting a divorce, and enabled her to predict that the famously globe-trotting Duchess would make two trips abroad. Most uncannily of all, she warned the Duchess that she would be double-crossed by an older woman who knew her secrets.
In these dark times, it is heartening to find a principled Christian who is publicly protesting about this. On his website, Peter Glover writes:
"Is there, I wonder, a better way for the modern Anglican Church to embarrass itself once more in terms of its international credibility and moral standing before the world? Off-hand I cannot think of one… If your home and family were continually threatened with murderous violence from angry neighbours who would see your point of view, hated you, demanded your land for themselves, and wanted to drive you and your loved ones 'into the sea', would you not think of building a fence to protect them? I would be out with the hammer and nails today.
"Now I realise fully that this is a caricature of the broader Palestinian position, many Palestinians just want a peace and a Palestinian state (which I support) on the land they already possess. But so to is this report a caricature of the true justice of the Palestinian problem. Remember, that Yasser Arafat was offered, by Ehud Barak, just about everything that fulfilled Palestinians aspirations at a Camp David meeting just a few years ago - and he walked away from the peace table. The Palestinian leader, not Israel, chose, at that high point when peace could well have been achieved, to continue the cycle of unremitting violence.
"The Anglican report reveals wholehearted prejudice against Israel which is typical of the Western liberal mindset and academic elites. While its findings do not bear close scrutiny it adopts the tone of the moral high ground. In truth however, the report is full of what this morning's Daily Telegraph op-ed rightly called 'sanctimonious claptrap'. Sadly, this is becoming the hallmark of the Anglican hierarchy. .. The Anglican Church is considering following the same highly controversial path trodden by the Presbyterian Church (USA) last year. But even the rather feeble Lord George Carey has warned that such a move would be "disastrous" for peace efforts in the region and another "knife in the back" for the Israelis.
"I am a Christian. I am also a Licensed Reader in the Anglican Church. Yet I have no compunction in talking about the amoral, often immoral, un-biblical liberal idiocy that motivates the rotting heart of modern Anglicanism, at least in the liberal heartland of the house of bishops. Let us not worry about God's insistence upon equity and justice and let's cut instead to the root of the Anglican problem: bigoted, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias. Idiocy born of blind leftwing, socialist ideology.’
I've figured it out. The Supreme Court has ruled that you can display the ten commandments if you ask "Mother May I?" first, or if you display the Code of Hammurabi next to it, or if you print them on realy lousy toilet paper and leave them out in the rain....or, or....
The hell with it. Just post one of those signs which used to be displayed at NYC beaches, with a big NO followed by: drinking, spitting, dogs, running, glass bottles, littering,etc.
That will keep people out of the courthouse, a very desirable end in itself. They're up to no good in there, I'll wager.
Cato the elder wouldn't shut up, and that started the Third Punic war:
A faction within the Senate, led by Cato the Elder, began to agitate against Carthage. Was it right, they asked, that Carthage should prosper while Romans toiled? Was Carthage's new prosperity not potentially dangerous? After all, the city had twice troubled Rome. And, in any case, Carthage was harming Roman mercantile interests.
Cato took the lead in these arguments. He was a prestigious statesman with a prestigious reputation. He was the classic virtuous Roman and he didn't mind that others knew it. His public career was spotless, his marriage was perfect, his oratory was compelling, his values were conservative, and all in all he got on some people's nerves.
Cato began to urge that the only sure defense against a resurgent Carthage was to destroy it. Rome would never be safe so long as Carthage stood. He made a campaign of it: Carthago delenda est! -- Carthage must be destroyed!
In the 150s this was Cato's slogan, repeated endlessly. At parties he would bring it up -- Carthago delenda est! In the Senate he might be speaking on any subject, but always found a way to work in his slogan: the harbor at Ostia should be expanded . . . and Carthage must be destroyed! the appointment of Gaius Gaius to provincial governor should be approved . . . and Carthage must be destroyed! A vote of thanks to a loyal tribal chieftain . . . and Carthage must be destroyed!
In the end, Cato got his wish. I might claim that Rome went to war simply to hush the old boy up....
There is no consensus amongst men regarding what women want. The only consensus we seem to be able to reach is that women do not want what they say they want.
Example: (Taken from random (free) dating site.)
"I like a man to be sensitive, understanding and funny. A man who is not affraid to show his feminine side. A man who will laugh with me when I'm happy and who will cry with me when I am sad. A man who takes care of the way he looks. Maybe goes to a solarium once in a while."
Translation: "I want to date a goddamn homosexual."
One of my patients litterally went crazy trying to become what women want a man to be. He took the list of requirements that women always force on you litterally and tried incorporate all those qualities within himself. He became sensitive. He became understanding. He became sweet, not-just-interested-in-sex, athletic, articulate, cultured, an equal-opportunity-freak, a good conversationalist etc. The list is endless.
One morning he woke up and his testicles were gone.
Ridgewood, New Jersey, the town where Fry grew up, names a street after him.
Does your gas pump ever make you feel wet and sticky?
So I'm at the gas station the other day, and I grab the nozzle from the pump to put gas in my car, and the handle is wet and sticky.* What the fuck? If you read my blog, you know that I think people in general are scum, and this was no exception. Who would get shit all over the pump handle, and then not clean it off? []
That got me thinking. All things considered, a gas pump handle has to be one of the most "handled" things in the modern world, and EVERYONE who drives ANYTHING needs gas.
That garbageman who just spent 12 hours getting maggoty garbage juice all over his hands, the new guy working for the tree service company with the seeping blisters on his palms from running the chainsaw all day, that fat chick who just dug her week-old underwear out of her ass before she got out of her car, the Harley dude who is allergic to showers -- all of them need gas for their cars, trucks, busses and bikes.
So along comes you, and you grab the handle and drop 20 in the tank. Even if you pay at the pump, you're still hanging onto that hotbed of viral funk for upwards of at least 3 minutes.... Then you jump back in your car, grab the door handle, the seatbelt buckle and the steering wheel...before you know it, your car is basically a rolling petri dish.
Then all you have to do is inadvertently rub your eyes or bite a hangnail, and best case, suddenly you've got three weeks to live. Worst case, you just ate an antibiotic-resistant strain of group A streptococcus, and 6 hours from now you'll be a steaming puddle of goo.
William Donaldson, who died on June 22 aged 70, was described by Kenneth Tynan as "an old Wykehamist who ended up as a moderately successful Chelsea pimp", which was true, though he was also a failed theatrical impresario, a crack-smoking serial adulterer and a writer of autobiographical novels; but it was under the nom de plume Henry Root that he became best known. []
The salient features about me are laziness, self-indulgence and sex addiction," he confessed, in his characteristic melancholy drawl. "I'm genuinely shocked by my own behaviour."
Blogging your way to fame, fortune, and a book contract. Sex and the City, move over.
'm always surprised by rock guys who are 1) smart 2) articulate 3) actually polite and nice-seeming. Dave Navarro is another guy like this. Actually, he's sickeningly nice, but still, likeable enough.
And now Alice Cooper, generous and interesting in his praise for other rock acts, says he enjoys the heavy metal thunder we're delivering to terrorists:
INTERVIEWER: A lot of people in rock and roll, it's very fashionable to despise George W. Bush. That's not a view you subscribe to, is it?
ALICE COOPER: Well, I think if you're in a war, you don't want a poodle in there, you want a pit bull. I don't think that you want a guy in there going, "Gee, I don't know. Maybe. Could be." I think you want a guy in there who's either going to win it or lose it.
...
INTERVIEWER: It doesn't worry you, the false connection that was made between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, all that stuff that's been shown?
ALICE COOPER: No. It doesn't bother me because I honestly think it's all connected.
INTERVIEWER: The one thing we do know about 9/11 is that nobody involved in it actually came from Iraq. That's probably the one thing we absolutely know.
ALICE COOPER: Well, it's probably true, but I can't see them going, "Oh, gosh." The guys in Iraq going, "Gee, how horrible for America." I think there's a general feeling in that world that if America falls they'll be in a much better state, so we have to view those people in the same boat. I don't see much difference between the al-Qaeda and Iraq - not the people, I'm talking about the governments. The people, the poor people, are the victims.
INTERVIEWER: Saddam and Osama bin Laden actually hated each other.
ALICE COOPER: Hated each other a lot, I'll bet. They traded Rolls Royces. You don't think there was a cigar going around when that happened at 9/11. I'll bet you there was.
I never liked shopping. For me, shopping had always been this tedious process....
But now, as we are living in the center of capitalism, things have changed drastically. To my utter and complete surprise I'm loving the whole idea of the shopping spree. I mean how can you not love it with all the great deals that are put in front of you? I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I first went shopping here. I could actually afford buying brands like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren among others.
How could you not love shopping here when you get up to a 70% discount on some of the most beautiful items you ever laid eyes on? Words like capitalism and consumerism really did not mean much to me before coming here. Now I understand. It is all about satisfying the consumer so the country’s economic gears keep churning. But really, give me a break. How can you not be an ardent consumer here with all the mind-boggling deals? Yes, I'm being sucked into it. But can I really help it? I'm a new immigrant after all.
On the other hand, seeing all of these great deals is making me somehow angry ... angry at all the time and loads of money I spent back in Jordan on mediocre products simply because I had no other alternative. Why is it in Jordan, where the minimum salary is 85 JD (about $119 US dollars) a month, people have to pay double -- even triple -- the price for the same products you find here. It is just so unfair. Think of it: Besides all of the political instability, social pressure and economic stagnation, the Jordanian consumer is always screwed. Okay, I'm very angry now. Gotta go do some shopping.
If politicians and pundits are really so desperate to understand the values of conservative America without leaving their living rooms, then they should start setting the TiVo to record another animated sitcom, ...which, despite its general policy of eschewing politics, somehow continues to offer the most subtle and complex portrayal of small-town voters on television: ''King of the Hill,'' on Fox. North Carolina's two-term Democratic governor, Mike Easley, is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state's voters into those who watch ''King of the Hill'' and those who don't so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom's fans.
I hope that someday technology improves to the point where I can blog naked from the bathtub without electrocuting myself.
This is Steyn, as usual brilliant, and I urge you to read the whole thing:
...in the words of one reader, ''it's not possible to 'torture' an inanimate object.''
That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.
There's been a cover-up at the New York Times!
I cannot link to this article, believe it or not! It is not in the NYT index, and
no wonder:
New Jersey's summer officially began on Tuesday, causing we at the Jersey column to wonder....
She's a children's book author, and she ought to know.
The pipsqueak on the left is my grandson. Click on picture to enlarge.
Nekkid, or if you are a librarian, Naked, Bloggers Day was a big success, I see.
However, if it is to become institutionalized, we will need to enforce compliance. How do we know these people alluded to in Lone Tree were really nude? Some of them no doubt surreptitiously wrapped the towel, thoughtfully provided to prevent painfully sticking to the chair, around their bodies, thus hiding all or part of themselves. Not cricket, I'm sure you'll agree.
Naked means naked. No clothing, not even a towel wrapped around your more interesting parts. So next year there will be a spot check and penalties to those who try to evade the rules.
We at the Naked (or Nekkid) Bloggers Association International take this very seriously, indeed.
Nothing in the world unites humanity more than,
Well, more than the desire to get nekkid. Let's face it folks; it's summer and it's hot outside. It's time to shed some layers, all of 'em if need be, and cool.
... Today, June 24, has been declared Blog Nekkid Day.
Now just so you don't go thinking this is a minor going on, let me be clear. This is International with a capitol I. Bloggers, beginning in New Zealand (where it's winter but the hot tub is apparently up to snuff) and circling the globe through the Middle East, Europe, Great Britain, and all across the US, are getting nekkid. Why? Because, Miriam claims it's a darn comfortable thing to do. And if you can't believe a sensible librarian in New Jersey, who can you believe?
Cover Story
How African leaders spend our money
Aidan Hartley
‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,’ prayed Janis Joplin, and the Lord obliged. With or without divine intervention, the late Pope had one. So does the Queen. Erich Honecker hunted at night by dazzling the deer in his Mercedes jeep’s headlights until he got close enough to blow them away. Mao Tse-tung had 23 Mercs. Today Kim Jong Il owns dozens, all filled to the gunwales with imported Hennessy’s cognac. Hitler, Franco, Hirohito, Tito, the Shah, Ceausescu, Pinochet, Somoza — they all swore by Mercedes. Saddam Hussein liked them so much he probably had shares in the company.
Today, though, there is one man who is doing more than the Lord himself to buy a Mercedes-Benz for the leading creeps of the world. That man is of course Bob Geldof, the spur to our global conscience. Africa’s leaders cannot wait for the G8 leaders — hectored by Bob and Live 8 into bracelet-wearing submission — to double aid and forgive the continent’s debts. They know that such acts of generosity will finance their future purchases of very swish, customised Mercedes-Benz cars, while 315 million poor Africans stay without shoes and Western taxpayers get by with Hondas. This is the way it goes with the WaBenzi, a Swahili term for the Big Men of Africa.
The legacy of colonialism is a continent carved up by arbitrary frontiers into 50-odd states. But the WaBenzi are a transcontinental tribe who have been committing grand theft auto on the dusty, potholed roads of Africa ever since they hijacked freedom in the 1960s. After joyriding their way through six Marshall Plans’ worth of aid Africa is poorer today than 25 years ago; and now the WaBenzi want more.
Let us take Zimbabwe, where millions of people are starving, 3,000 die weekly of Aids and life expectancy has fallen to 35 years. In 2005 Britain will give Zimbabwe £30 million in aid, making it one of the three biggest donors. The government will say this money funds emergency relief. Try telling that to the hordes of people whose homes have been burned down and bulldozed in recent weeks. Giving corrupt governments money frees up budgets to squander on cars.
As an example of hypocrisy, it is hard to beat the call for ‘clean leadership’ in Comrade Robert Mugabe’s recent address to Zanu-PF’s Central Committee. The old dictator condemns:
‘Arrogant flamboyance and wastefulness: a dozen Mercedes-Benz cars to one life, hideously huge residences, strange appetites that can only be appeased by foreign dishes; runaway taste for foreign lifestyles, including sporting fixtures, add to it high immorality and lust.’
He is clearly talking about the WaBenzi, and their preferred version of the marque, the S600L, a long-wheelbase limo with a monstrous 7.3-litre V12 twin-turbo-charged engine. It’s as powerful as a Ferrari and 21 feet long. Basic price £93,090, but extras could be £250,000 more.
From NBC4 via drunksex:
SAN FRANCISCO -- An attorney for a woman who says she was fired from a bartending job for refusing to wear makeup said the dismissal is an affront to female employees.
The case is being heard by a federal appeals court in San Francisco. The sex-discrimination case was rejected by a three-judge panel last December.
An attorney for Harrah's Entertainment argued that the makeup policy is necessary to "create a professional image."
From Untimely Death, by Cyril Hare:
He had brought plenty of books with him....He picked up successively a historical work which he was very anxious to read, a neglected classic which he had always intended to read and a cheap thriller which he had brought along because Eleanor [his wife] liked that sort of stuff.
One hour, eight chapters, and 120 pages later, he was contemplating the predicament of a heroine who owed her perilous state entirely to her pig-headed refusal to inform the proper authorities that in chapter I she had found a dead body....
Thanks Matt!
You've put me on the map!
I'm sitting on my pillow and blogging (nude), this time waiting for the stuff that removes hair from your legs to do its dirty work. These chemicals get all over a person's clothes.
Remember, Friday is the day!
Who says you have to wear pajamas to blog? I assure you they are not compulsory. You can wear a tuxedo if you wish--or do as I am doing now, wear no clothes, as I wait for the fake tanning lotion to tan me.
Comfy!
I found this tidbit at Drunksex, who found it at CNN:
BASEL, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Perhaps the oddest piece of work at Art Basel is a bar of soap, displayed on a square of black velvet, purportedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's fat, removed during liposuction.
Gianni Monti's work called 'Clean Hands' -- the title is a play on the name of an anti-Mafia group -- sold in less than an hour for 15,000 euros ($18,000) to a private Swiss collector, according to Monti's Galerie Nicola von Senger of Zurich.
How inconvenient for the whole template of "Americans are torturers" storyline that we have uncovered a true torture chamber in Iraq. For those who are working themselves into knots trying to find a new historical parallel for supposed American evil now that Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are so last week, perhaps they could read this story and think a minute about true evil.
The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed
The prisoners at Gitmo are not people who robbed a 7-11 to get money for the baby's formula. Some of them were undoubtedly in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I understand 100 or so have been released and repatriated. Many of these have again taken up arms against us.
Let's prioritize: Here's my list of important concerns:
1 through 10: Winning the War on Terror.
2-25 Getting the bastards before they get us.
In the interests of brevity, let's skip a few hundred.
Moving down, then, we find:
2497; Touching up my roots.
2498: I need a pedicure.
2499: Deploring the state of present-day television programming.
2500: Worrying about the abuse of terrorists at Gitmo;
2551. Giving a brass farthing about the treatment of the Holy Book.
Where were the bastards when Hitler was persecuting Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, making bonfires of books? Explaining that boys will be boys? And anyway, Hitler was the leader and we had no right to interfere?
First, my grandson, who is visiting, installs music downloading software so he can burn a CD. The computer slows to a crawl. David, my computer guru, takes it off.
On my next visit, my grandson installs Google on my home page. David takes it off the next time he comes to see why the printer doesn't work.
My daughter installs game software so she can play games online. It takes a lot of memory. David takes it off.
I install Mozilla Firefox because all the bloggers love it. I love it. David takes it off. He also goes into my program files and deletes a load of cookies.
He goes away. I reinstall Firefox. I am a blogger. He can't mess with me.
The printer goes again. I figure out that the wrong printer is installed as the default printer. I try to delete the old printer from the printer file. It won't go, but the printer works again.
The printer stops printing, says it is not communicating. That's the trouble with modern life--too little communication. If only we could communicate. The printer refuses to cooperate.
Google adsense goes away. I reinstall it, but I must have done something funny. Also, my links do not work.
Time to get a life.
I will be glad to accede to his request.
His blog is wonderful--one of the most amusing I've ever seen.
On my recent post about children's books, I made a very grave omission--Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. How could I? To quote another New Englander, it is seared--seared in my memory.
The book was so riveting because the girls were real live people who formed a real family--with their jokes, squabbles, problems and vanities. Every girl who ever read the book identified with Jo, the impetuous, warm-hearted yet hasty-tempered heroine. I don't know anyone who read it who didn't shed a tear at the death of Beth. Yet it seemed right and fitting for Beth to die--you sensed she was too good to live.
It did not seem right or natural for Jo to turn down the proposal from her childhood friend, Laurie. He had everything: they were soulmates, he had money, he adored her--what was not to like? I'm still mad at Louisa May Alcott for that.
But maybe Louisa had her reasons. She had seen enough of marriage, perhaps. Her father, Bronson Alcott, a true idealist, never met a principle he would not sacrifice his comfort and that of his family for. As a traditional nineteenth century husband and father, he was a dud. Louisa had to earn her own living and provide for the rest of her family as well, much of the time.
2) John Bolton is probably not a nice guy. This probably isn't reason enough to Bork him.
(2) (a) The mustache might be.
We librarians believe in free speech. We defend our First Amendment Rights. We are in the forefront of the fight for freedom.
Well, in my grubby little life, the issue only came up once. A man stuck his head into my office door, followed by a hand holding a book. "This book is the filthiest thing I have ever read!"
"Would you like to fill out a formal complaint in writing?"
"No. But it's filthy. Absolutely filthy. I'm surprised the library allows such books."
He left, taking his Great Dudgeon with him. I looked at the book, which was the Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy.
This was my only skirmish as a soldier in the Global War against Censorship.
True story:
Somewhere along the gulf coast of Florida, between Fort Myers and Naples. a strange sect had a compound, back in the 1930's. They believed that the earth was round, all right, but people lived on the inside nstead of the outside surface of it--like living inside an orange. It was all country back then, and they didn't bother anybody, so they were left alone, inside their orange.They collected many books in support of their theories, and being a librarian, I met their librarian at a county-wide meeting. But by that time, nothing was left except the library.
The end came when their leader died. He was supposed to resurrect himself, you see, and didn't. They left his body for a few days to give him an honest chance to come back to life, as promised. Finally, the Lee County sheriff had to intervene--you know the weather in sub-tropical climates. The group lost faith and shortly after disbanded.
Those still left alive probably believe hat the World Trade Center was demollished from within.
In college, I reread a number of children's books that I loved as a kid for an independent study on children's literature. Then I reread them again to my son, which was great. The ones I loved have held up:
# The Chronicles of Narnia
# The Wind in the Willows
# The Little House series
# Mary Poppins
Librarians are never happier than when they are defending some lofty privilege or "right." It's to show everyone how important and professional we are. When we look at our shabby paychecks and the lack of respect from university officials and local politicians (collectively the scum of the earth) it gives us a warm feeling inside to know that we hold high the torch of liberty.
Meanwhile the government has never invoked the Patriot Act to obtain a library's records. Never, in almost four years. Does this reasonable statement of fact calm our fears? Of course not. We prefer the high road of principle over rationality.
That's why our professional organization, the American Library Association, will defend to the death the right of anyone, any time, to access porn on library internet computers. Never mind the miserable working conditions and lousy hours of librarians in the field or our (shockingly low) pay scale.
According to the librarian quoted by Tinkerty Tonk,
I try to explain to people why I stay in a state with difficult technology access and a lot of teeny tiny libraries that don’t pay very well [and only a few that do]. One of the main reasons is that all three of my national-level representatives are not disagreeable to me. Today Bernie Sanders managed to pass legislation in the House which would amend section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and prohibit government agents from using FISA warrants to obtain records from libraries and bookstores. My two senators are trying to pass similar legislation in the Senate. Of course keep in mind that one of the reasons, according to Alberto Gonzales, that the Department of Justice hasn’t had to use the USAPA more is because they have been getting “voluntary co-operation from librarians” which is a different sort of problem.
Monday morning--root canal. Not one of your ordinary, virginal root canals. This was a do-over, which costs more. It must be harder, too--I heard the dentist muttering under his breath. He finally had had enough and left the thing open, to see if it would heal.
The next morning--it didn't heal, the woound is still open, but my attention was somewhat diverted by the cellar being flooded. The plumber finally came and declared the hot water heater unfixable and left us here in a pool of our own sweat.
Today he came with the new hot water heater. Showers all around. Whoopie!
I got a bill to renew the registration of two cars I don't think I own any more.
I called the IRS because I had lost the copy of my tax return. The automated voice mail said 2004 was unavailable. I finally located a live person who told me that the people who were owed money were entered into the computer first. The people who owed the government weren't entered yet, althought their checks were cashed.
My printer went into one of its fits and won't print.
My new fax machine isn't installed yet.
I got a bill from a doctor unknown to me.
I can't eat solid food.
The reasons for the popularity of genital makeovers should be familiar to regular readers of Sexploration. As we’ve seen, pubic hair grooming has become practically a must. When all that hair gets shaved or waxed off, the naughty bits become much more obvious. We can see what’s up down there. And men and women are watching more porn these days, looking at the newly visible private parts, and comparing. Just as women clamored for the Jennifer Aniston hairdo during the early “Friends” era, men and women want to be as pretty down there as the people they see on their TV screen or in magazines.
“People have suggested they’ve looked at Playboy or Penthouse,” confirms Dr. Ronald Blatt, medical director of the Manhattan Center for Vaginal Surgery. “They come in and say, ‘Make it look like that.’”
Remember Henny Penny, who declared: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Well, Frank Rich has ably taken her place.
I have a question for Frank Rich, and I'm quite serious: in what way is the Bush Administration comparable to that of Nixon? Has Bush broken into any offices? Has he ordered retaliatory IRS audits against his enemies? Are there any charges that he has bugged the home telephones of journalists he doesn't care for? Has he obstructed federal investigations? I'm not joking, Frank...your whole column is an infuriating insinuation...put up or shut up, pal, 'cause your brand of garbage is starting to smell...
LONDON: Hundreds of naked cyclists staged demonstrations in London and Madrid yesterday in protest against the West's dependence on gas-guzzling cars.
The organisers of World Naked Bike Ride 2005 said protests were expected in a number of countries, including Canada, the US, Ireland, Italy, Latvia and Israel.
In London, crowds gathered as 100 cyclists left Hyde Park Corner.
Most of the riders had stripped naked for the 10km ride past Piccadilly Circus, Big Ben, Covent Garden, Oxford St and the US Embassy.
Some bikes carried banners reading "Oil is not a bare necessity but a crude obsession" and "Support the trade justice movement".
In Madrid, dozens of nude cyclists pedalled past famous landmarks, drawing surprised looks.
Most were men, naked except for shoes and helmets, or caps for the sun.
Reuters
Islamic countries apply a double standard when it comes to the treatment of "holy books" and people who differ in faith and practice from Islamic dogma. While Islamic groups in the United States are engaged in "sensitivity training" sessions for non-Muslims that have included federal workers, the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Air Force Academy, there are no such training sessions directed at Muslims to teach them tolerance for non-Islamic faiths. Quite the contrary.
While the slightest verbal or physical slight of any Muslim in America is immediately condemned by activist groups and sometimes the U.S. government, the denigration of Jews and Christians throughout much of the Islamic world is theological and political business as usual. Jews are regularly referred to as "apes and pigs," mostly because that is what the Koran calls them.
According to the MEMRI-TV Monitor Project, which observes the way Jews, especially, are portrayed throughout the Middle East, a Jordanian produced program titled "Stories From Before the Verses Came Down" was aired in February on Saudi Iqra TV. The soap opera contained familiar anti-Semitic stuff, including blaming ancient Jews for distorting their own Torah to make it seem like Mohammad could not be the "true prophet" and portraying a Jewish character saying, "We are the slayers of prophets, and we live off their blood! We live for destroying them"
According to a report authored by former CIA Director James Woolsey for Freedom House, the government of Saudi Arabia has made it a practice to disseminate propaganda about Jews, Christians and America through mosques in the U.S. and through schools, many of which are funded by the extremist Wahhabi Islamic sect.
The 89-page report titled, "Saudi publications on hate ideology fill American mosques," concludes that propaganda collected from U.S. mosques shows a "totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence." The report also says such mosques are in the minority, but how many are needed to train terrorists who might attack the U.S. with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons?
One thing I never understood about the Flintstones world is their obsession with stone. They have wood. They have plenty of sharp stones. Why would they have spoons and bowls made of stone? Is the concept of basic woodworking so elusive to them?
[M]ilitary investigators delved into allegations that recruiters were engaged in sexual misconduct at the Ukiah office.... []
...
The investigation into misconduct by North Coast recruiters surfaced this week when a Ukiah high school student told reporters that three male recruiters had sex with young women, some of them poolees, at a Feb. 17 sleepover in the Ukiah office.
The girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she had sex with one recruiter two previous times at the office after he told her it was a requirement to join the Marines.
I am selling a house for $314 K and buying one for $280 K. That means a profit of 34 thousand dollars. Right? Do the math.
Wrong. To sell house #1 I must pay the attorney, the realtor, and a transfer tax of $1.5%. Chump change. To buy house #2, I have to pay a deposit of $3,000, 1.5 % transfer fee, house inspector, termite inspector, attorney, title search, and for some reason the mortgage banker extracted a check for $795 from me, I forget for what.
That puts me at minus $5,000. I get to keep my car, a 1995 Taurus with 110,000 miles.
Oh, right. I have to pay the movers.
What was Watergate really about? At the time, I read the papers diligently, but I could never figure out what started the downward spiral. The break-in to Democratic headquarters? What was the purpose of that? Instead of winning the election 60-40, he wanted to win it 61-39?
After the initial break-in, Nixon did everything wrong. Taping himself in his office--what a bright idea--to preserve for posterity every foul=mouthed or anti-Semitic remark. Not destroying the tapes. The 18 minute break in the tapes. Making a speech announcing, "I am not a crook," a truly cringe-worthy statement, which made me wince at the time.
Later, reading the self-serving memoirs of everyone concerned, I was even more puzzled, but one fact emerged: his aides, assistants and flunkies had way too much time on their hands, time they spent jockeying for position and prestige and stabbing each other in the back. They would have been better off mowing the White House lawn or watering the plants.
So who cares who Deep Throat is, or was? With so many idiots involved, the story was bound to come out. As the expression goes, "two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead."
Anyway, Nixon was a jerk and a lousy president, right up there (0r down there) with Jimmy Carter. He was wrong about just about everything, and felt sorry for himself to boot. We were well rid of him.
... I'm inviting you to send me your favourite movie stars. Choose them how you like, whether for acting ability, star quality, looks, whatever. But you have a maximum of 10 votes to distribute over the two categories in the poll - that is, male movie stars and female movie stars - and you have a maximum of 7 votes in either category. This means, if I have to explain (and even if I don't), that should you use all of your 10 votes, you may distribute them between the men and the women, the guys and the dolls, the dudes and the broads, either 5 and 5, 6 and 4, or 7 and 3, or vice versa - which in the case of 5 and 5 is nothing to get your knickers in a twist about. No need to rank; each vote will only count for one.
I haven't had many exotic experiences in my life, but I did make beer. Here's what you need to get started, accoording to Physicsgeek.
1 3-5 gallon brewing kettle
1 5 or 6 gallon glass carboy
1 6.5 to 7.5 gallon "food grade" plastic fermenter with airtight locking lid
1 6 foot length of 3/8-inch inside diameter clear plastic tubing
1 racking cane
1 fermentation lock
1 rubber stopper to fit the fermentation lock(It's bad form to not notice until you're pitching the yeast that they don't fit. Not that I know from experience or anything. I'm just saying.)1 2-3 foot length of 3/8-inch outside diameter tubing which should fit the next itemlarge plastic funnel
1 spring-loaded bottling wand
1
1 floating thermometer
1 hydrometer
1 bottle capper, for which you'll need lots of new bottle caps.
50-60 beer bottles, preferably the non-screwtop type. Brown glass is the best, but pretty much anything will work.
I forgot to mention how important proper sanitation is. Let's go the cheap route yet again and use unscented household bleach. You don't want your beer to taste lemony fresh. Ugh.
This is one case where the Biblical adage proves correct:, "To him who hath more shall be given, and to him who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away." Link courtesy of drunksex. Quote, courtesy of Jesus.
Don't send me snarky comments, I didn't write the Bible.
I'm surprised they didn't take his undies.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty rejected a bill that was overwhelmingly passed by the Legislature that would have allowed him to appoint a poet laureate after receiving recommendations from the nonprofit Minnesota Humanities Commission.
The laureate would have been called on to provide verse for 'appropriate ceremonies and celebrations' of the state, such as the 2008 sesquicentennial. No state money would have gone with the job.
In a veto message signed Friday and announced Tuesday, however, Pawlenty said he saw no need for such a position.
'We can benefit from the richness and diversity of all of the poets in Minnesota and recognize and embrace their work as merit and circumstances warrant,' he said.
He also suggested that the measure could lead to "requests for a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter."
Trinity, Peyton and Brooklyn are up there, too. Also Kennedy and Kendall.
Why must people strain to be original and yet all be original in an identical way?
If I live long enough, my new doctor will be called Dr. Trinity Oppenheimer or Dr. Reagan Wu or Dr. Destiny Patel.
This used to happen a lot when we lived in Brooklyn. Sometimes we wuld ride around for hours looking for a parking spot. On one occasion, we gave up and drove to Coney Island for hot dogs. But in California?
Every Thursday at 1:55 PM the south side of Leeward Ave. is packed with parked cars. Each and every car has a solitary person inside sitting in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead. Just one person, just sitting there. It's as if everyone's anticipating an atomic blast or an alien invasion and they're getting ready for a mass exodus. It's kind of creepy. It also has an army-of-aliens-posing-as-humans or Stepford Wives vibe. All these people sitting there, parked at the curb, staring straight ahead, one after the other. They, of course, are claiming their spots for when 2 PM rolls around and the street cleaning window ends.
I know this because lately I've had to learn how to cope with the miseries of street parking all over again. Having recently purchased a new vehicle while still being in possession of the old puts me in the position of having two automobiles. This is not a problem since my underground parking space (which I pay for) is fortuitously large and able to hold two vehicles in it comfortably, without causing any discomfort or inconvenience to anyone else. My building manager .... told me .... that I'm entitled to park one vehicle only and threatened to tow any others []
So I've had to put my old car out on in the world and do the street cleaning shuffle twice weekly. The problem with this is that everyone else in a half-mile radius is doing the same thing and all spots are taken by 2:01 PM. Last Friday night I got home at 5 in the morning after an 18-hour workday, pulled my old car out of my garage, put my new car in, then drove around for almost 40 minutes looking for a spot to park. I ended up finding a spot about ten blocks away, then made the half-mile walk home and slept for about 12 hours. Then someone ripped off (literally) the tags on my license plate and put them on their own vehicle. Then I got a ticket for not having those tags. Then about five different vendors shoved fliers under my windshield wipers. Then pigeons shit all over my car.
Who would ever live in Los Angeles by choice? Even the nice areas are awful. I'll bet this bs never happens in the SLC.
But wait until next month--national ice cream month--yum.
Decision 08 wants to save the outrage for, well, outrageous things;
Many outrageous things are going on in this world, and some outrages are bigger than others. Here's what I find outrageous:
* Terrorists are killing our soldiers in Iraq.
* Kim Jong-Il is running a Stalinist, countrywide gulag, while Amnesty International gets headlines criticizing the U.S. for some (admittedly disgusting, but isolated) regrettable lapses.
* Darfur.
* The United Nations sex scandals and Oil-For-Food.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
By saying that, I'm not saying the judicial fight is not important. If that's what outrages you, then by all means get outraged. The rhetoric that flowed, though...my God, folks, it was a procedural compromise in an elected body. Nothing got set in stone, no one died, and we have the ability to throw the bums out, if we so choose.
What a bore! I picked up Jane Juska's book, A Roundheeled Woman, to read about the amorous adventures of an older woman. But before I was well begun, I found the usual liberal tosh:
Behind me, the schizophrenic in his red beret roamed the young people's reading section, spinning the carousels and swearing at the books as the spun....
Across the table ...a homeless man snored softly....I sighed. It was the beginning of the winter, when the homeless came to the library....Not long from now, the smell...would come to be overwhelming. But none of the librarians objected to the seasonal takeover, nor did any of the patrons. We were bound together by guilt and frustration and an unutterable desire to feel the touch of another human being.
The people in my neighborhood...feel guilty and helpless and angry at the disgrace heaped upon our heads by a government...that chooses to ignore the poor and the sick.
I always wondered where Bertie Wooster found this statement, which he made< I believe, about Aunt Agatha's country place: "Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile."
What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile; In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown; The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone.
Author: Bishop Reginald Heber
Source: From Greenland's Icy Mountains--Missionary Hymn
A lovely day. Perfect! Unmatched in its meteorological clemency! However could I consider leaving such a place? We sat outside without feeling the damp poke our joints; I pushed Gnat in the swing and watched her beam at the bright high sky. Opened the window and let the smell of summer – fresh mown grass mixed with gas and 2-stroke oil – waft into the house, driving out the old stale aroma of dog food and bygone fish. This is why we live here; this is why we stay. Because it’s lovely. Also because we are conditioned to turn over the Etch-A-Sketch and erase the memory of last week’s punishment as soon as the bluebirds peep.
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