Because Homosexuals Never Fight

I do love our military; though not in that way...

The Air Force (via boing boing) considered making

Chemicals that effect human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.

Because there's no one they'd rather "fight" than horny faggots.

I took a month off from my job a while back and hired a replacement, who wasn't quite flaming, but was really into rugby (he was from South Carolina), told me he'd rather be a nurse, and etc. (Give me a break, he was gay, ok?) His former occupation: a sniper with the Marines.

Hooked on bunnies

Check out the other bunny-stocked classics here. Every one a treasure, if you're keen on this kind of thing.

Pony Up, Blogger

This would certainly change things.

The New York Times Co. is considering subscription fees to the online version of its flagship newspaper, which now is available for free....

It could be that free web news, like free music in Napster days, will have been a short-lived anomaly. That sucks, but I'm sympathetic to the news providers, because, honestly, do you even see the ads anymore? My eyes look right past them; I can't name a single ad I've seen online this week. I don't see an easy answer to this one.

Good One

I try to avoid "Either stupid or mendacious" rants, because there's usually a more generous reading, but, well, here's one (via kos) where there isn't:

After I was captured, my hands were tied behind my back and I was struck repeatedly in the face with an open hand. After enduring the beating I was thrown on the water board, where under questioning the enemy would drown you till the verge of losing consciousness, only to revive you and start all over again. Then a black bag was secured around my head and throat which made it difficult to breathe. I was confined to a three by four foot tiger cage with a coffee can for a toilet. Loud music blared from speakers in the compound and I was repeatedly dragged from my cage for more beatings and interrogation. At night when it was freezing the guards would pour cold water on me. I was deprived of any food for five straight days.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Well that is only part of what EVERY U.S. Navy and Air Force pilot and flight crew goes through in survival school. The Army does it for their special forces guys as well. We do this to our own people for training but we can't do it to terrorists?

Incredible.

The letter writer is clearly sincere, and therefore an idiot. Goldberg: either stupid or mendacious.

Life, Liberty...

Not to sound alarmist, but holy shit.

SEE UPDATE

Over Already?

Two very funny belated holiday items via Snark Attack. It's a Wonderful Life, re-enacted in 30 seconds, by bunnies. And a gallery of children scared by Santa. Number 7 is priceless.

Tell Me

Does Lucy Mangan get no comments because you all think it's a dumb post or because there's not much to say except, "Hey, she's funny"?

That's the Last Time I Not-Date Someone from a Third-World Country

January 6th, and I haven't heard back from the Grad Student. I knew she was going to be in Sweden for a while, and assumed that they don't have email there. But it turns out that Swedes just don't use email at all. Live and learn.

Welcome to the Lucy Mangan Fansite

I am in love.

You're a fatuous insult to the species. You should be stripped and burned at the stake of commonsense. I will stoke the fires with Jonathan Cainer horoscopes ripped untimely from the Daily Mail, and as the flames lick ever higher, I will suck the smell of grilled moron greedily down into my lungs.

Forever.

I was in Hamleys on Saturday, picking my way through the revolting excrescences that cling to the wilting branch of humanity and comprise the nation's prepubescent youth. One was hyperventilating in the aisle, unable to complete his whining cries of "I want ... I want ... !" Pausing only briefly to kick him in the head ("I'm sorry - is that not what you wanted?"), I wondered if it would not have been kinder to bring him up expecting the kind of Christmas my father enjoyed. He and his 89 brothers and sisters were happy to find a cobble each and a bag of nutty slack under the tree. Their heavily darned stockings were stuffed with the week's groceries and the kids were allowed a quick sniff of a potato before the veg was put back in the larder. All except for a pair of carrots which his formidable mother would whittle into the shapes of Tom Finney and Alma Cogan and barter for gin and cigarettes on Boxing Day. In the afternoon they would put her in the recovery position on the kitchen floor and go and kick a pig's bladder up and down Paedophile Ginnel until it was time to come in and cough up blood. Simple pleasures, simply achieved was a recipe for happiness, as my dad still uses his remaining lung to gasp at us over the turkey every year.

More.

thank you, ben hammersley

Yes Mr. Chairman, I Believe Disabling Shopping Carts is a Deterrent Against Homelessness

When did the SUV revolution come to shopping carts? I was just at the grocery store, pushing a cart, and if there were two other people in the aisle, I couldn't pass, because our carts were so damn big. And is there some kind of organized crime racket in stealing shopping carts? Because otherwise, I can't understand why it makes sense for the store to have outfitted these massive carts with an electronic device that locks the wheels if the cart is taken off the property. This is insane, right?

The Enabler

What needs to be said about Gonzales and torture (do read it), in the NY Times no less, but I have one dissent:

After Mr. Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order and propriety - will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.

Too late; it already belongs to us all, and has since the election.

UPDATE: This is a joke. They're asking Gonzales whether he approves of torture. Of course he can say "no," because his own infamous memo defines torture so narrowly. It's precisely his narrow definition of torture that's at issue. What they should be asking him is whether he thinks putting lit cigarettes in people's ears, jamming things up their asses, and keeping them chained to the floor for days is torture.

Vanity

Maybe I'm revealing self-centered neanderthalic tendencies here, but one of the great things about being in a relationship is that you can let yourself go a bit: little out of shape, old clothes, funny hair...it's ok!

When I was with my fiancee, I bought a bright red and yellow running shirt, and had fun wearing it. It's not a very manly shirt, but when there's a beautiful woman waiting for you at home, or better still, running with you...it's ok! One of the times I wore it post-breakup, some teenager driving by yelled "Bitch!" That's a little harder to shake when there isn't a beautiful woman at home.

And one of the great joys of having a girlfriend was cutting my own hair. I have a skinny, pointy head, and a big nose, so I look totally goofy with really short hair, but it's just so comfortable, and it's so easy to set the clippers for 3/4" and go to town. I gave that up when I became single again, making a sop to vanity and going back to the barber. But honestly, the last time I was at the barber I told him it was "getting a bit long on top," which, when he finished, it was clear that he heard as "long on top." I can screw up my own hair for free, thanks, so last night, it was back to the clippers. I look like a fool, but I'm loving it.

Doing Right

I've been nursing a grudge against Time magazine ever since they picked Einstein over Mandela for "person of the century." If the 20th century was the century of man's inhumanity to man, no one fought against it with more dignity or success than Mandela. And his story is also a chance to look at race, post-colonialism, neglected Africa, etc. Anyway, that's all by way of saying, Mandela is on the right side of history again,

Former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa announced today that his eldest son had died of AIDS, making a highly unusual disclosure in a country whose populace is both hard hit by the disease but reluctant to acknowledge it.

...

"For some time I have been saying, let us give publicity to AIDS and not hide it," Mr. Mandela said. "It is the only way to make it appear like a normal illness. To come out and say someone has died of HIV, then people will stop regarding it as an illness reserved to people who go to hell and not heaven."

I know his very name is almost cliched, but he really is an extraordinary figure.

A Nice Way To Kill (Some) Lawyers

Here's a thought.

If you're injured in New Zealand, regardless of cause or blame, the ACC scheme entitles you to:

>> Free medical care.

>> Payment of a proportion of your salary, while you recover.

>> Payment of compensation, if appropriate.

The ACC scheme replaces the right to sue for damages. In New Zealand you cannot sue someone for causing you injury.

Destroyed

Amazing before and after pictures of tsunami-destroyed areas.

via marginal revolution

I'm Not Blogging This

I know there's a torture kerfuffle going on in blogdom at the moment, but, honestly, Glenn is right: this will become a "Democrats are soft and looking to score points" issue. (His post is still laughable insofar as he writes as if anyone could avoid charges of partisanship while still subjecting the administration to proper scrutiny.) But, in any case, I've given up. Complain, protest, organize and fund all you want; one more attack here and your neighbors will be lining up to torture somebody, anybody.

And Put a Smile on My Face

A co-worker just came to me and asked if I'd ever heard of "blogs."

Seemed Obvious To Me

Ted gives Andrew Sullivan an award for using "out-of-context quotes to dismiss viewpoints with which he disagrees." I know Sullivan's tactic is effective, and maybe that's all it takes for Ted to also find something admirable, but I think there's an important distinction between the two, and I would have hoped that a philosophy professor could see it.

Technical Support

I don't know if you noticed last month, but Unfogged ran over its bandwidth allotment and the site was down for a couple of hours. Today, I see that we'll probably go over again this month, but not because traffic to the site is up, but because of our mail traffic. That's very strange, because unless Fontana or Bob or Unf is trading nudie pics with his Unfogged account, our mail traffic should barely vary from month to month. Here's what tech support had to say when I asked them about it.

The POP traffic would go up if there is heavy incoming mail traffic to your domain.

Ya think? And that's the response I got after I told them that I'd been going through the site logs, and pointed them to the specific day that mail traffic spiked. Oy.

"Heh."

Opening a review of the new season of "Alias," the NYT's Virginia Heffernan uses her Super Bitchy Powers to attack Fortress Holbo:

Let's be honest. Many of us don't like comic books and have feigned interest in their jumpy bif-bam fighting scenes and the way they redeem loser guys, only to impress and minister to those loser guys. And now we can admit that while the redemption dynamic - little X-Men boys finding in their eccentricity and loneliness a superpower - is touching, there's nothing duller than listening to someone explain, in all seriousness, the Syndicate and the Shadow Force and the Hard Drive and the Plutonium Lance. And the characters: lame. One is good and the other is evil, and then one is evil pretending to be good, and then one is good pretending to be evil.

Her underemployed fanboy ex is grimacing in agony...

See What You're Missing

It's expensive, but if you don't have access through school or work, Lexis-Nexis AlaCarte might be quite handy. Search all you want, $3 to read an article.

via ben hammersley

Redistribution

Sandra Bullock seems like a real sweetheart, and good for her for what she's doing, but in what just world does she have $2 million to give away? UPDATE: I had no idea. I haven't seen a Sandra Bullock movie since the original Speed. Go Sandra.

Choochoo

I'm going by a very small sample of friends and acquaintances on this, but doesn't it seem like lots of people would love to take trains, if only trains were even a bit more convenient? Which is to say that the politician who understands the point Jack is making could score big points and gain national prominence.

Tryin' on the jeans

Following this SNL skit, some friends of mine took to saying that people embarking on extraordinarily unwise courses of action were "tryin' on the bad-idea jeans." This and this from Prof Goose (via mcm in comments) seem to be an instance of taking off the jeans: a recently tenured faculty member has sex with a 19-yr old student, she gets pregnant, her parents sue, prof gets in trouble.

(All of this emphasizes how different is the small and tony liberal-arts college from, say, the R-1 where I went to graduate school: I suspect that, as a TA, I could have sawed of the heads of some students with a carving knife and escaped unnoticed, but here ...not so.)

Bedazzled

After I went to Alaska, I was telling people that it was hard to believe the place was on the same planet, let alone still in the United States. This is first set of pictures I've seen that gets the idea across.

Googlemoms

I have a serious question: what the heck is wrong with mothers? This is from tonight's 60 Minutes story on Google. Co-founder Sergei Brin, you know, the guy running one of the coolest companies in the world, the one who's personally worth about $6 billion, says,

...there is one ambition he admits to: finishing his Ph.D. "My mom asks me every week," he says. "I actually do keep meaning to finish it. But I haven't found quite the slot of time."

Every week? Is that not completely neurotic? And last night I was watching some "Making of Clerks" documentary and when someone called Kevin Smith's house about running it in a film festival (or some such), his mother, who answered the phone, said (something like) "You mean someone actually liked that piece of garbage?"

What the hell?

Clues

Since I've been stuck at home all weekend with a cold, I've watched an ungodly number of Law & Order episodes. And I'm thinking that maybe it's not the peek into people's lives that I like so much about the show. It's the sleuthing of the detectives; specifically, how little bits of vague information lead to something definite. "What was the name of the guy she was hanging out with? Dunno. Apparently, he said he was a producer. Oh, yeah, she mentioned someone like that. Did she say anything else? No, but she said a limo driver introduced them. Who was the driver? Dunno. But she always used AAA limo service..." And off we go to the limo service. I get a charge out of seeing those connections made, and L&O is so good at not giving the game away too quickly. And what makes the show particularly good is that it's those connections and leaps of logic that are scrutinized in the second half. The tension between what we (along with the detectives) "know," and what makes a sufficient legal case is the drama, built on the first half's puzzles. I love it.

Hmm: But sleuthing is voyeurism of another sort: finding what's hidden; seeing what someone hopes you won't see. I guess the ex is still right, then.