I have it on excellent authority that small kittens have done literally dozens of impossibly cute things in Iraq, yesterday alone. But are we going to read about that in the so-called paper of record? No, it’s all “there was this coordinated attack on Christian churches”, and “militants kill Turkish hostage; trucking group withdraws from Iraq over safety concerns.” As Tacitus blogger Bird Dog rightly asks, “Which is actually more newsworthy, something we hear about every day (terrorist bombings) or previously unheard of signs that Iraqis are stepping forth and taking steps to restore their country?” Signs like that one time in Mosul, when the kitten pretended to stalk and pounce on that dented beer cap, like it was a mouse or something, and everybody laughed. Remember that? Right before the mortar attack, remember?
Posts by author:
Belle Waring
Milbarge, blogging at Crescat Sententia, has a nice post up about blogcrushes.
I’ve been talking a lot about this with a friend of mine. My friend confesses to a blog crush here and there, too. But my friend’s position is that the crushes are on the blog, not the blogger. I think my friend believes that the image of bloggers we get via the blog aren’t “real,” and my friend would rather have a crush on the idea of a person, based on what one sees on the blog, rather than the reality.
Do you think blogs reveal a person’s true personality? Is the truth-shading, the omission of embarassing details, etc. one gets in a blog any worse than one would get from a conversation with the person? Or are people perhaps more exhibitionist in print than they would be otherwise? (This must be true for many shy bloggers. And, I think, none of you will be surprised to learn that I am not shy.) A friend who hasn’t seen me in a long while read John and Belle Have a Blog recently and said that it was just like talking to me–that the posts were perfectly Belle-ish. I think that’s true, although I try not to curse so much on the blog. (Then again, now that I have small children I don’t curse in front of them either.) Thoughts? Do any of you hasve blogcrushes? Are we seeing the real Kieran here? Can Little Green Footballs possibly represent the real Charles Johnson, who appears at one time to have been a mild-mannered web designer of some talent, not notably lizardoid in any respect?
Who is to blame for America’s obesity epidemic?
“Feminists and liberals have transformed a legitimate medical issue of the poor into identity politics for the affluent,” [author and friend Greg Christer] told me, “which I find the worst kind of narcissistic behavior.”
The New Yorker has the inside scoop on what really ocurred when Dick Cheney threw down on Sen. Patrick Leahy, (D.-Vermont):
As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle….
Unfortunately, as other senators (along with assorted aides and support-staff members) were casting their votes to decide the winner, using the admittedly subjective but generally accepted “Make some noise up in here!” protocols, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Leahy took the proceedings to what one aide accurately described as “the next level.”
Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) was the first to notice that the two men were circling each other, Mr. Cheney brandishing a switchblade and Mr. Leahy the jagged neck of a broken bottle.
“Oh, snap!” Mr. Kennedy recalls thinking at the time. “It’s getting kind of hectic up in this piece.”
Man, some of those professional writers are almost as funny as the Fafblog!
Pursuant to a discussion of the recently popular Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, Will Baude makes the following remarks:
My friend mentioned that she has some trouble with all of those old Bogart films because she finds Bogart so physically repulsive that he detracts from the role. To be sure, H.B. was not Hollywood’s prettiest face, a fact that (unsurpisingly) seems to bother more female viewers of the films than male ones. [Female members of my family voiced a similar complaint about Something’s Got to Give last Christmas.]
This is funny to me for two reasons. First, though Bogart’s no beauty, he’s hardly replusive. Second, Bogart is perfectly cast in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon, a movie which is marred by the single most egregious miscasting of all time. (Perhaps it is not the worst in absolute terms, but it is a hideous flaw in an otherwise brilliantly cast movie.) I refer, of course, to the wretched, wretched Mary Astor. She was only 35 when the movie was made, but she looks much older. The character she plays, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is supposed to be a knockout who can wrap any man around her finger. A sexpot. Men’s eyes are supposed to pop way out on stalks and develop pounding hearts for pupils, while steam shoots out of their ears and they make various foghorn and train-whistle noises. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Mary Astor falis to plausibly elicit this reaction.
Once again, we must turn to Fafblog for thoughtful political analysis. Giblets considers the various Democratic vice-presidential contenders:
Dick Gephardt. Gephardt would have an amazing pull with loser voters, voters who like losing the House to opposing parties, voters who have a long history of being supported by decrepit and dying labor institutions in failing political campaigns, just people who generally like to lose. He could swing loser states, such as Wyoming or Rhode Island, or put states with a large loser population, such as Nevada or Alabama, into play. The upside to having a Kerry-Gephardt ticket is it would take all those people who go into shock in the voting booth thinkin’ “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry?!” and push them just far enough over the edge with “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry and Gephardt?!” that it would sort of jar them into a feeling of complacent somnambulism that would render them susceptible to voting for Kerry-Gephardt anyway. The downside to this is that such a hypthetical waking sleepstate could also get them to vote for Nader.
This is so, so very true. I’m afraid we must all bow down before the superior nous of Giblets. Gephardt? Gephardt??!! Please, God, don’t let the Democratic party snatch certain defeat from the jaws of potential victory by choosing Dick Gephardt as the VP candidate. Pleasepleaseplease. Anybody but Gephardt. If the DP makes me cast a vote for a Kerry/Gephardt ticket I’m going to…well, crap, just put out like a straight-ticket ho. They could put a can of processed cheese food on the ballot against Bush, and I would vote for it. But I’m not going to enjoy it! And no ticket with Gephardt on it is going to win, ever in a million years! How can this blindingly obvious fact be so clear to Giblets yet obscure to Kerry? Maybe they are just toying with us. Maybe. Then when they pick Vilsack, instead of saying, “who the hell?” we will all just be so grateful they didn’t pick Gephardt that we’ll get all fired up, like, “Hey, that Vilsack, he sure does…have a lot of consonants in his name! Frickin’ awesome!”
Courtesy of the now non-blogging (but suspiciously time-wasting-on-the-interweb) Chun the Unavoidable, I present you with the Mayday Mystery. These are a series of mysterious ads which have been running in an Arizona paper since May 1, 1985. It seems to be an erudite, mathematico-historical puzzle of some kind, containing specific Tuscon-area clues (?), but what is the point? Is there a prize? Some of the ads are rebus-like, while others tend to the Dr. Bronner’s label All-One-God-Faith style. Sample text from the May 1, 2004 edition:
1) “Quaerendo invenietis” [1747]}}!!+}The 473rd Anniversary of the Confessio Augustana will again be celebrated in the Riemann Room of the 5)Hotel Californias (non uni fidit antro) where the Founders will be entertained by an in situ demonstration of 17) l’art d’accommoder les restes. The Pigs will be less entertained by le dénoument–and the Hirelings least of all. 29) Alberich has programmed The Symmetry Generator as per I Corinthians 1:28 to serve as the propaedeutic for Ireton’s penetration of [$\omega_{p,n}= i log Ëœp^n$] on Trinity Sunday.
Perhaps the brainy CT readership will figure everything out? If there’s lots of money involved, the solver of the puzzle is respectfully encouraged to pass some along to your humble author. Perhaps I will use it to take a vacation in Thailand. I hear Koh Phi Phi is very nice this time of year.
UPDATE: Adam Kotsko has put out a call for posts for a Chun the Unavoidable Festschrift. Suggested topics include: Halitosis in Literature, Cunnilinguis and the Discursive Performance of Class, Richard Clarke, and The blogospheric reception of the verb “to chun.” You know what to do, people.
I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.
Henry’s Harry’s post about his only proper job, and the tea breaks which it necessitated, reminded me of the finest weblog devoted to tea and biscuits: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. This week’s biscuit of the week is is Lidl’s Choco Softies: “In the second of our Lidl’s inspired reviews we couldn’t come away with out my picking up a pack of Lidl’s own brand version of a German classic the Super Dickmann.” I honestly have no idea what any of these things are, but nonetheless it is a very charming site.
My mom, still right about everything. In a previous post, I explained her immediate skepticism about the Brandon Mayfield arrest. From the NYT today:
…the F.B.I. at one point told federal prosecutors that Spanish officials were “satisfied” with their conclusion.
But in interviews this week, Spanish officials vehemently denied ever backing up that assessment, saying they had told American law enforcement officials from the start, after their own tests, that the match was negative. The Spanish officials said their American counterparts relentlessly pressed their case anyway, explaining away stark proof of a flawed link — including what the Spanish described as tell-tale forensic signs — and seemingly refusing to accept the notion that they were mistaken….
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police’s science division, said he was also struck by the F.B.I.’s intense focus on Mr. Mayfield. “It seemed as though they had something against him,” Mr. Corrales said, “and they wanted to involve us.”
The FBI continues to maintain it was just a random mistake by an examiner who didn’t even know Mayfield’s name, much less his religion, that initially led them to focus on Mayfield. I continue to maintain that’s total BS. Finally, does this fingerprint examiner have a family? Because I bet they would really, really like more time to be spent with them.
Statistical Update: This 2001 Washington Post article lists some widely varying estimates as to how many Muslims live in the US. The highest number was produced by a group of Muslim organizations and has been the subject of some doubt (numbers in millions).
Mosque Study Project: 6 to 7
2001 Britannica Book of the Year: 4.1
National Opinion Research Center: 1.5 to 3.4
CUNY Religious Identification Survey: 2.8
Reading the article, the methodology of the Mosque Study Project was obviously pretty bad. The total U.S population, according to the census bureau, is 293, 425, 566. So it seems as if probably more than 1% but substantially fewer than 2% of Americans are Muslims. I think that in the original article the FBI said the computer provided them with 50 close matches, from which Mayfield’s print was chosen as the best by an examiner (again, allegedly, without reference to his personal details).
Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman, has had enough of pie-in-the-sky democracy-promotion, and is ready for some bracing realism:
We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing possible — tilt it in a better direction — so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.
More federal than Syria? Frickin’ awesome! This reminds me of a joke of my grandmother’s on the difference between hell and heaven. In heaven, the cooks are French, the lovers Italian, the cops English, and the bankers Swiss. In hell, the cooks are English, the lovers Swiss, the cops French, and the bankers Italian. Airmiles’ list seems infernal: more democratic than Saudi Arabia? Less theocratic than Iran? Gosh, is such a country even concievable?
And what’s up with the only thing that was always already the only thing possible? To wit, a US-friendly, “democracy-minded strongman“, one imagines? (Now with 50% more mindfulness.) I tell you what: when I go around spending blood and treasure like water, I like a bit more value for money.
A recent post on our blog about whether any of the situations in the Alanis Morrisette Song “Ironic” were, in fact, ironic, has garnered unexpected interest. I looked at the lyrics more carefully, and I think perhaps half could be said to qualify in an extended sense, that is, they seem like dramatic irony. So: “rain on your wedding day” is unquestionably not ironic, it’s just somewhat unfortunate. But I’ll give her “death-row pardon two minutes late”, I guess, if we accept a certain notion of irony I outline below.
My mother was visiting here in Singapore when Brandon Mayfield was first arrested in Oregon. The FBI claimed to have found his fingerprint on a plastic bag associated with bomb materials turned up by Spanish investigators of the Madrid train bombings. Mayfield is a white American convert to Islam, and was tangentially associated with one of the men convicted in an Oregon terrorism case (Jeffrey Battle), having represented him in a custody dispute. He claimed not to have been outside the US in nearly ten years, a claim made all the more plausible by the fact that he does not currently have a valid passport.
Mom’s verdict: this is a total set-up. The FBI has been monitoring this guy for a while and now they want to pin something on him. But Mom, I said stupidly, granting that fingerprint matching is not a particularly exact science, and wrong ID’s do happen, what are the odds that the wrong match would happen to be a convert to Islam with any connection, no matter how tenuous, to any alleged terrorists? And she said, exactly. You just wait and see. Well, once again, she was right (though, as of a few days ago, he was still barred from talking about the case or leaving his house without permission from the authorities). Here is a quote from the official FBI apology to Mayfield (I’m actually pleased and suprised that they did apologize, so, 10 points for the FBI):
Some really inspiring poetry from the National Review Online. Sample:
We face scheming murderers with calm defiance.
They have soulless evil, we have self-reliance.
They butcher civilians, their cruelty shows.
Our steel, true steel, is tempered by blows.
Let them come and dare face us, or run, if they choose.
In battle or treachery, the wicked shall lose.
For the acts of their madness are in truth their death throes.
They’ll die on our steel that they’ve tempered, with blows.
Isn’t rhyme great? I think it’s clear that only soulless lefties could be moved by the blank free verse (thanks Rachel) so popular with all the modernist kids these last 80 years or so. Give me good, old-fashioned rhyme any day! And moral clarity! The author, one Rob S. Rice, is a classicist, and on behalf of classicists everywhere I’d like to offer a remorseful apology. Sorry about the whole Victor Davis Hanson thing, too. In fact, I’m going to step up to the plate and take full responsibility for both men (N.B. no actual consequences follow from this.)
I recommend that you check out Wonkette’s dissection of the American Conservative Union’s 40th anniversary party. If I were the conservatives, I would have ‘accidentally’ neglected to send Ms. Cox an invitation, but we can all be glad that they were less prudent. Go on, it’ll give you that “thank god I’m on the left because conservatives are a bunch of big lamers” frisson that’s so cheering when all is bleak. (No, seriously. Who’s the coolest famous conservative in America? Jonah Goldberg. That’s just sad, people.) Highlight:
9:30PM No after party? Sure, there’s an after party. It’s in the bar, and the tab is being picked up by the ACU. A dozen twenty- to thirty-somethings, drinking beer. Luminaries (LaPierre, a Virginia congressman whose name I forget, Grover) come over to have hands kissed, say hi. As the night wears on, another difference between attendees at this event and the journo-types who dominated the others (WHCD, RTCA) emerges. . . how to put this delicately? Hmmm. OK: I have not had my rack checked out so brazenly and so often since I stopped going to Cozumel for Spring Break. What is it with the cultural conservatives? They’re all Ken-Starring me and shit.
In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, “ha ha.”
UPDATE: Sophomoric and partisan, you say? A similar party by a Democratic group would be equi-lame, you say? It’s a fair cop. But you have to admit the Jonah Goldberg thing did sting a little.