A Few More Things

Finishing up my post-election post-mortem:

1. The Democrats disproved the old axiom that you can't beat something with nothing. They did. All they had to offer to the electorate was that they were not George W. Bush and were not Republicans. Apparently, for a majority of the people who turned out to vote in an off-year election, that was enough.

2. Human sacrifice had long since fallen out of fashion here in the Americas, with the last recorded cases occurring among the Aztecs and the Mayas. Well, at least until yesterday, when Donald Rumsfeld was dragged to the top of a pyramid in Washington, D.C. and had his still-beating heart ripped out and offered to the new goddess Pelosicutli. It is unknown whether this will guarantee good crops next year.

3. Article that sums up my views perfectly: Abandoning Iraq by David Warren:

So far as President Bush can be blamed, it should be for showing insufficient ruthlessness in a task that could not be accomplished by half-measures. Alternatively, for failing to grasp that America was psychologically unprepared for real war, not only by the memory of Vietnam, but by the grim advance of "liberal" decadence in domestic life over the generation since.

The great American jurisprude, Robert Bork, expressed his foreboding to me four years ago, before Iraq had even been invaded. "It took the New York Times five years of war in Vietnam to turn on President Johnson; but this time they are at the President's throat from day one." As he further noted, the whole approach to the impending and inevitable Iraq war was being skewed by the need to assuage political and diplomatic adversaries.

As Fouad Ajami argues in his new book, The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, the invasion was so surgical that not even the functionaries of Saddam's regime suffered heavy casualties when he fell. The "Sunni Triangle" -- that patch of the country that had profitably ruled the oil-bearing remainder through decades of Saddam's terror -- in which he murdered Shias, Kurds, and uncooperative fellow-Sunnis by the hundred thousand to maintain his power -- capitulated quickly. How different from the scenes of national devastation that persuaded Germans, and then Japanese, at the end of World War II, to accept American-imposed democracy. For them, resistance was futile. For the Sunnis of Iraq, terrorist violence would be rewarded by the collapse of American will.

Exactly. Read the whole thing.

American Fools

There's an old saying that "it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."

A majority of the minority of the American electorate that actually votes has spoken and removed all doubt.

The Democrats have promised a "NewD irection for America." Congratulations, voters. You're screwed. I'm screwed. We're all screwed. All of us.

I'm going to get a bumper sticker next year that will say "Don't blame me; I voted Republican." For those of you who didn't vote or who voted for Democrats, you deserve what is going to happen to you in the next couple of years.

Here are a few things you can expect:

1. Your taxes will go up. The Democrats will claim, "Oh, we're only going to raise the taxes on the rich who aren't paying their fair share." A number of people who thought that they were middle-class are going to be shocked to learn that the Democrats have decided that they are "rich" and thus deserve to pay more in taxes. Well, open up your wallets, you kulaks! "For the Greater Good!" (which will be Hillary!'s campaign slogan in 2008, since "Peace! Land! Bread!" has already been used.)

2. The stock market is going to slide. That 12,000 Dow? Your bullish retirement funds? Kiss 'em goodbye, sweetheart. That's for rich folks, and they're gonna be facing more taxes and regulation that will make it more difficult for business. Also consider that many of the owners of small businesses will be included among those "rich" folks who will be paying more in taxes when the Bush tax cuts are allowed to lapse by the Democratic congress. Bad times are coming for the economy.

3. The minimum wage will be raised, leading to higher unemployment and inflation. Wonderful for those poor folks at the bottom of the ladder, right? Wrong. It will just lead to higher unemployment among the minimum wage demographic AND to inflation as well, since the increased cost of labor will be passed on to customers. Enjoy your $10 Big Mac in 2007, as well as your $40 meal at a downscale restaurant. Maybe we can break out the old Gerald Ford 1976 "Whip Inflation Now!" buttons for 2008.

4. Illegal immigration will no longer be a problem once the new Democratic House signs off on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform package. They won't call it "amnesty," but that's what it will be. Esperanza que no es una problema para Ustedes!

5. The Iraq War and the War on Terror are over. The American people were given a choice between the Stupid Party, which took them seriously, and the Dangerous Party, which does not. The voters chose the Dangerous Party. Expect the Iraq War to be de-funded and the troops quickly pulled out, just as the Democrats did in Vietnam in 1975, and also expect the Iraqis to get the same treatment that the South Vietnamese got: Having their financial and military assistance slashed to nothing and being left to the tender mercies of the wolves in their neighborhood.

Remember the scene in the movie "Animal House" where the Deltas have taken Flounder's cousin's Lincoln Continental out on a road trip and trashed it, and Flounder is sobbing about what his cousin is going to say. One of the leaders of the frat house says to him, "Hey, you fucked up! You trusted us!" THAT is how America will be remembered if we abandon Iraq the way we abandoned South Vietnam. Unfortunately, it is exactly what I expect from the Democrats. And it will damage our foreign policy efforts world-wide for decades to come. No one will ever trust us again, nor should they if we cut and run.

The Democrats will block anything that is effective in the War on Terror. They will bend over backwards to preserve the non-existent constitutional "rights" of terrorist suspects, and will block wiretapping of possible terrorists overseas. The end result of all of this is predictable:

6. The odds of terrorist attacks will increase exponentially beginning on January 20th, 2007, because our Democrat congress will make it easier for our enemies to pull them off.

As I said, if you voted for the Democrats or failed to vote for Republicans, you deserve what is going to happen to you in the next two years. You buy it, you own it. I only hope that the body count isn't too high, and that if it is, we'll finally get serious about the War on Islamic Fascism. I don't expect that to happen unless something a couple of orders of magnitude worse than 9/11 happens, and I don't take much solace in the fact that most of the victims are likely to be Democrat voters in big cities in blue states. This time, though, unlike 9/11, they won't be able to say that they didn't see it coming.

Vote or Shut Up

It's election day here in America. If you're an American citizen and a registered voter, this is your chance to select your congressional representative for the next two years, and possibly those who will occupy other offices as well, including the senator and/or governor for your state, and various other state and local officials as well. You also may have an opportunity to vote yea or nay on various amendments to your state constitution. This is your opportunity to make your views known.

None of this will happen if you do not go to the polls. In a presidential election year, turnout in American elections seldom tops 60% of registered voters. In an off-year election, it's significantly less, perhaps less than 40% . Frankly, I think that is shameful. I vote in EVERY election, including the primaries. In the Florida primary in September, the turnout in my county was a pathetic 23%, but I was there.

Elections have consequences, and the people who are chosen today to run our government will make the decisions that will affect this country for the next two years. There are two competing world-views out there. You know what they are. If you don't, then you shouldn't be voting anyway. If you are, however, reasonably well-informed, then you will have an opinion about which party better represents your views. Vote accordingly. If you can't be bothered to vote today, however, then you have no right to complain about the decisions that will be made by your representatives in your name. In other words, get out there and vote or else just shut up for the next two years about anything having to do with politics.

A Thoughtful Essay From Orson Scott Card

The Only Issue This Election Day

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

Read the whole thing. It may challenge your world-view, but you'll be better off for it.

You Know It's Gonna Be A Bad Day When...

1. You manage to remember to grab your cell phone, iPod, wallet and keys on your way out the door, but forget your lunchbox. You discover your error when you get to work.

2. You find that you have some $20s and three $1 bills in your wallet, as well as another dollar's worth of change. Unfortunately, the machines won't make change for a $20. Bright side: There is that bag of Milky Way Dark miniatures in your locker. You won't starve. Your $4 will get you three soft drinks and a strawberry cheese Danish for lunch.

3. You find out when you get to work that the power had gone out earlier in the day and that everything is fouled up. Trays of mail are being spread manually, like you did it back in the 20th Century. You find that "retro" isn't really that cool after all. And yet, even with all of the inconveniences, the mail still goes out on time. Yeah, you're that good.

4. Finally, when you go out to your car to scrounge for change on your first break, you take a look at the mail you grabbed out of your mailbox on the way to work. Oh, joy! A jury summons for Friday December 1st. Yesterday, I waxed eloquent about "civic duty." Well, jury duty is another one. Hopefully I'll get lucky and not have to serve.

Kerry: Still A Douchebag

Just watched the asshole's press conference. What an arrogant prick! First he makes a stupid statement last night in Los Angeles, about how if you don't study hard and be smart, you'll end up stuck in Iraq. Many have interpreted that to be an insult to the intelligence and education of our troops, although Kerry insists that he was insulting President Bush, not the troops. Perhaps that was what he intended, but it was clumsily done, as was Lurch's trademark in 2004.

In any case, he came off looking like an asshole in his press conference. I still despise him and everything he stands for and am glad I voted against him in 2004. I hope that this boomerangs against both Kerry and the Democrats next Tuesday. Go ahead and offend veterans, you stupid dick! See how it pays off for you.

Hint: I suspect that on November 8th, Kerry is going to be as popular as a California arsonist during the Santa Ana season.

One More Week...

And then we can get this election over and done with. Frankly, I'm sick of hearing about it, but I will go out and vote because I consider it a civic duty. I think that a lot of the same people who were disappointed on Election Day 2004 are going to be disappointed again, no matter what the mainstream media and the pollsters say. I'm deeply, deeply skeptical of the polls, for one simple reason: The people who are sampled in the polls are people who choose to cooperate with the pollsters. Most people don't have the inclination to give 15 or 20 minutes of their free time to some nosy stranger. However, there are some people who are deeply unhappy, and it is human nature to want to share that unhappiness with others. Those are the people who are delighted to give their time to the pollsters, to bend their ears with how much they hate George W. Bush and how unhappy they are with Republicans being in charge and how angry they are about being out of power. The Republicans, who aren't that dissatisfied, say, "Sorry, too busy to talk now" and hang up. Happy people don't take part in polls. This is why the polls have said what they have for so long. Those who are counting on those polls to predict the results of the elections and to "measure the drapes" for their new offices may be in for a rude shock on the night of November 7th.

The bad news is that the would-be candidates for the 2008 presidential race are already starting to scuttle out of the woodwork. A congressman from California made his announcement of an "exploratory committee" yesterday. Ugh! Give us a few months, people! Have the decency to wait until 2007, at least! I think that when the 2008 Florida primary rolls around, I won't vote for anyone who announces his or her candidacy in 2006, just to make the point.

P.S. Happy Halloween!

Things That Make Me Angry

I'm a libertarian at heart. I don't care who sleeps with whom, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Note that teenaged girls are not "consenting adults," so I have no pity for Warren Jeffs' polygamist cult. But when I read this AP story, I was ticked off:

Boy Killed in Crash on Sect's Land

ELDORADO, Texas - A 3-year-old boy was killed and another child was injured Thursday when a minivan they were riding in crashed on a ranch owned by polygamist sect led by Warren Jeffs.

Allen Rulon Jeffs was pronounced dead at a local hospital, and 3-year-old Richard Rulon Jeffs was in critical condition Thursday night. Isaac Steed Jeffs Jr., 3, and the driver, Barbara Joy Jessop, were treated and released, the San Angelo Standard-Times reported Friday.

It was unclear whether the victims were related to Warren Jeffs, who has been arrested on charges of forcing a teenage girl to enter a spiritual marriage with an older man. His attorney has said Jeffs believes the case is religious persecution.

A news release from the Schleicher County Sheriff's Department said the minivan hit a boulder while traveling on a gravel road in Eldorado, about 190 miles northwest of San Antonio.

The boys were not wearing seat belts, Sheriff David Doran said. No charges are expected, Sheriff David Doran said.

"No charges are expected." Excuse me, Sheriff, but did you know that it is required by law in the state of Texas that all children under the age of 5 and 36 inches in height be buckled into an approved child safety seat when riding in a car? At the very least, the driver is guilty of breaking that law, as well as negligent homicide in the death of that little boy.

As I said, I'm a libertarian at heart, but not when it comes to wearing seat belts. Seat belts save lives. People who don't buckle up are stupid, and people who don't buckle their children up are stupid AND negligent. I'm sure that the woman's heart is broken, but the law is the law, and it should be enforced so that everyone knows that children have to be buckled up in the car, even if you're a religious cultist. If you have so many kids that you can't afford child safety seats, then get a horse-drawn buggy like the Amish.

/rant

Updates

First, I'm sure you're wondering about the rest of those Samuel Adams beers I wrote about the other day. I liked the George Washington Porter, which was a strong, thick dark beer. The James Madison Dark Wheat Ale was pretty good too. It was noticeably thinner than the Porter. I didn't like the 1790 Root Beer Brew at all. I had a few sips, said, "Yuck!" and poured the rest down the sink. Three out of four ain't bad, I guess.

Second, on the new 8 GB iPod Nano: This is the best thing since sliced bread. I've had it for a couple of weeks and it lets me carry an astounding amount of music around with me at work. With m0re than two thousand songs to choose from, I can't complain that there's nothing to listen to.

I'm also getting a chance to get re-acquainted with some parts of my CD collection that I haven't listened to in a long time, as well as finding the holes in it when I find that I don't have a certain song that I want to hear. Usually it turns out to be something that I had on cassette at one time or another.

Today, listening to some early Beatles albums (Beatles For Sale, Help!, Please Please Me), I was reminded of the sheer songwriting genius of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Most of the best songs were theirs, and the ones that didn't hold up so well were the ones that others had written. There's some mediocre stuff on those albums, but the ratio of hits to mediocrity is very high. And these guys were putting out two albums a year, plus singles, in the early '60s. They were amazingly prolific.

Testing YouTube

Let's see if this works. This is a Republican campaign video made by David Zucker, the director of movies like "Scary Movie" and "Airplane." I found it at DrudgeReport.com. It's the campaign video that was too hot to handle.

Changing the Subject

I was going to write a lighthearted post today about Columbus Day and wonder how much longer such a politically incorrect holiday could survive.

However, due to certain current events that you might have heard about, I've decided to write about something else instead. One thing's certain: The subject of political discourse is about to change, from a really nothing sex scandal to a serious discussion of national security, missile defense (and those who would block it), and foreign policy mistakes.

For one of the biggest ones, see the archival picture. I really hope that in retrospect, it isn't remembered like the one of Neville Chamberlain getting off the airplane and telling the British people that Herr Hitler was someone that they could work with and that there would be "peace in our time."

Thanks, Madeleine. Thanks, Jimmy. Thanks, Bill. You gave away the farm for absolutely nothing. Way to go.

P.S. Given that the NorKs officially went nuclear on Columbus Day, by which holiday will the Japanese join the club as well? Easter? St. Patrick's Day? Presidents' Day? Martin Luther King Day? The other countries in Asia probably won't like it, but tough shiitake, as they say.

"Have You Ever Seen This Much Lively Robot?"

Steven Den Beste at Chuzumatic pointed me to this site:

"Doukoku" Animatronics & Robots

It brings to mind Frau Farbissener from the Austin Powers movies, shrieking "Bring in the Fembots!" Except these Japanese "Actroids" don't shoot bullets from their jubblies. There's a little bit of Engrish on the page, but most of the sentences make sense. Note that the robots shown on that page appear to be the DER model, but the pictures on Chizumatic are of the new Actroid DER2 model. Here is another picture of the new DER2.

Definitely cuter than C-3PO or R2-D2.

What's On My iPod

Last night, the answer was "not much." I messed up when recharging and synching things up on my iPod yesterday, and clicked on the option to synch my Top 25 Most Played songs. Unfortunately, that was ALL that was on my iPod last night, since it cleared everything else off. It was easy to fix that this morning, and I now have everything back on the iPod. Anyway, here were my limited options for listening last night:

1. "She May Call You Up Tonight" - Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - Under the Covers, Vol. 1 (2006) - This is one of three songs from that CD in my Top 25. The CD is a collection of fifteen covers of '60s songs, some well-known, some obscure. This one is one of the obscure ones, with the original performed by The Left Banke (whose big hit was "Walk Away Renee"). Needless to say, I really like the song.

2. "It's All Been Done" - Barenaked Ladies - Stunt (1998) - A great song with a storyline crammed into 3:26. Have we met before... and before... and before?

3. "And Your Bird Can Sing" - Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - Under the Covers, Vol. 1 (2006) - The original version was on the Beatles' Revolver album, which is also on the iPod. I also have a version of the song on the Beatles' Anthology set where John Lennon giggles his lyrics throughout the song.

4. "Monday, Monday" - Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - Under the Covers, Vol. 1 (2006) - The Mamas and the Papas were the original artists on this one. This version is in a slightly different key. It works for me; it might not work for you.

5. "I'm Down to My Last Cigarette" - k.d. lang - Shadowland (1988) - Yeah, I like country, too. I love her vocals...

6. "I Touch Myself" - Divinyls - Divinyls (1992) - Speaking of vocals, there's only one Christina Amphlett. You'll probably recognize the song if you saw the Austin Powers movies. Remember the scene when he made the Fembots heads' explode? Yeah, it's that song.

7. "Family Tradition" - Cracker - Countrysides (2003) - This comes off an album where Cracker went out and played honkytonks under the name of Ironic Mullet. This is their cover version of one of Hank Williams, Jr.'s signature songs. Sobriety strictly optional.

8. "Mr. Wrong" - Cracker - Cracker (1992) - An amusing song from Cracker's debut CD. I love these guys, so you'll see some more of them further on down the list.

9. "American Jesus" - Bad Religion - Recipe For Hate (1993) - Driving guitars and sardonic lyrics. Great song.

10. "The Metro" - Berlin - Best of Berlin 1979-1988 (1988) - Quintessential '80s synth-pop. The first time I heard it, I thought that it was Debbie Harry and Blondie, but it turned out that I was wrong.

11. "Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)" - Cracker - Cracker (1992) - "What the world needs now is another folk singer, like I need a hole in my head."

12. "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" - R.E.M. - Eponymous (1998) - I'm kind of surprised that I've played this one more than "It's the End of the World As We Know It," but there you go.

13. "True to You" - Ric Ocasek - This Side of Paradise (1986) - This was the Cars' lead singer's first solo album, and on this song, he has the entire Cars lineup except for drummer David Robinson backing him up. It has the Cars' sound in spades.

14. "Surrender" - Cheap Trick - Heaven Tonight (1978) - "Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself awaaay-aaay-aaay-a-hey."

15. "Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down" - Cracker - Countrysides (2003) - This time, they do Merle Haggard. Again, sobriety strictly optional.

16. "Ain't Gonna Suck Itself" - Cracker - Countrysides (2003) - This was the only song on the CD that wasn't a cover. It's Cracker's way of kissing off their old label, Virgin Records. Rude and funny.

17. "Pictures of Matchstick Men" - Cracker - Hello, Cleveland! (Forever bonus disc) (2002) - "Hey, waitaminute! That's a Camper Van Beethoven song!" you say. And you're right. But David Lowery was in Camper Van Beethoven, which is why he's doing the song on this live disc. Love the wailing guitar chords that open this song.

18. "Used to Love Her" - Guns N' Roses - G N' R Lies (1988) - Yeah, it's misogynistic. Hey, it's a song. Get over it.

19. "Raspberry Beret" - Hindu Love Gods - Hindu Love Gods (1990) - This was Warren Zevon and all of R.E.M. except for Michael Stipe, getting together and jamming on a bunch of classic blues tunes, and this cover of the Prince song. Kicks ass!

20. "She's Vibrator Dependent" - Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper - Root, Hog or Die (1989) - Mojo's not for everyone, but most of his stuff is funny as hell, and this story about a man who's "been replaced by batteries" is one of his funniest.

21. "I've Done Everything For You" - Rick Springfield - Working Class Dog (1981) - Great '80s pop/rock song, written by Sammy Hagar. My favorite song by Springfield was "Bruce," where everyone gets him confused with Springsteen, including his own mother! Unfortunately, I don't have that one. Yet.

22. "Hanging On the Telephone" - Blondie - Parallel Lines (1978) - Unlike the Berlin song listed earlier, I always knew this one was done by Blondie.

23. "Banditos" - The Refreshments - Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy (1996) - Another story song, about a cross-border bank robbery, with the classic lyric "Everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people..."

24. "The Riverside" - Cracker - Greenland (2006) - This is my favorite track off their newest CD. It's got an uchronic feel to it, as well as a weird wailing hollow sound that reminds me of the cry of a lonely sea monster. Don't ask me why...

25. "Flagpole Sitta" - Harvey Danger - Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? (1997) - "I'm not sick but I'm not well..." Great song.

Marlins: Stuck On Stupid

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, the Florida Marlins have fired manager Joe Girardi after one season of his three-year contract. This happened despite the fact that Girardi is likely to win the National League Manager of the Year for his heroic achievement of keeping the Marlins in the N.L. wild card race well into September, even though the team had the league's lowest payroll and was largely made up of untested rookies. The team started a horrific 11-31, and it appeared that the prognosticators who had predicted that the Marlins would have the league's worst record were well on the way to being correct. But Girardi helped turn the team's fortunes around, and the Marlins briefly went over .500 in September and were contenders for a wild card playoff berth until a late-season slump. They finished at 78-84, much better than anyone had hoped at the beginning of the season.

So why fire Girardi? Because he had disagreements with the general manager and the owner, including one memorable case where the owner, Jeff Loria, was arguing with the umpire from his box and Girardi told Loria to knock it off because he wasn't helping. Needless to say, almost all sports team owners are self-absorbed egomaniacs to some degree (See Steinbrenner, George; Cuban, Mark; etc.), and Loria was no exception. How dare this, this hireling!, tell him to shut up! At that point, Girardi's fate was sealed, even if the team had managed to sneak into the playoffs and then win the World Series, as they did the last two times they won the wild card berth.

Let's be honest: Girardi did one helluva job getting the young Marlins to play as well as they did and to stay in contention in an admittedly weak National League for as long as they did. Will new manager Fredi Gonzalez be able to do as well? It remains to be seen. The Marlins' loss will be someone else's gain, however, and I expect that Girardi won't be unemployed for very long. He's a Chicago native, so don't be surprised if he ends up managing the Cubs next year.

8 GB? Yes and No

My new iPod arrived on Friday. I had imported more than 7 GB of CDs into the iTunes program on my computer, and was surprised to find out that when I plugged in the iPod to synch it that the actually amount of space on the iPod was not a full 8 GB but only 7.45 GB; I think that the rest of the space is taken up by the operating system. When everything was synched, I only had about 150 MB of space left! Ah, well, time to do some pruning. I unchecked some songs on the CDs where I only really wanted one song anyway, and then put another CD or two on. I've got some more CDs coming from Amazon, so when those arrive I'll have to do some more pruning.

The iPod itself is impressive. It's about the size of one of those Skor candy bars and now contains a sizeable chunk of my CD collection, more than 2000 songs total. It could play for about six days and not play the same selection twice. I can't say "not play the same song twice" because there are some redundancies where I have the same song on one CD and also on a greatest hits CD by the same artist. Don Henley's "Boys of Summer," for instance. I hate to prune the one off the regular CD because it would break up the flow of the disc. (I keep wanting to type "album," which dates me.) Decisions, decisions.

Ripping Tunes

I finally broke down and ordered one of the new-generation iPod Nanos. I got the 8 GB version, which comes in any color you want as long as it is black. There were some cool color options in the 4 GB version (I really liked the blue and green ones), but I decided to go with double the capacity for an additional $50. I downloaded the iTunes 7 software yesterday and now I'm busily importing tunes into it, so that I can synch them onto the iPod when it arrives. The one I got is supposed to be able to hold about 2000 songs. So far, I've ripped about 20 CDs. Right now, I'm just doing the ones where I want the whole disk. Later, I'll go after single songs to fill things out.

So why did I get the 8 GB Nano rather than the 30 GB iPod with video that was about the same cost? Well, to be honest, there are a couple of reasons. First, I'm not gonna be watching videos on that little screen. I wear bifocals, for chrissakes. I wanted a small music player with large capacity and good battery life. The new version of the Nano says it has a battery life of about 24 hours (your mileage may vary), which is twice as long as the older version. It's about the size of a small candy bar, only a quarter-inch thick, and weighs 1.41 ounces, and it has an anodized aluminum casing, which should be much more scratch-resistant than the older version of the Nano. Finally, the main reason I went with the Nano is that it stores the songs in Flash memory, rather than on a hard drive like the 30 GB video version. That means it has no moving parts and isn't going to give me any trouble if it gets bumped or jarred like a hard drive version might. Flash memory is more expensive than a hard drive, but again, the new Nano has about double the capacity of the old one for the price.

Back to ripping...

The Fox News Clinton Interview

I watched Chris Wallace's interview of Bill Clinton on Fox News Sunday earlier tonight. In my opinion, Clinton didn't come off very well. The more he talked about how hard he tried to take out Osama bin Laden during his presidency, the less credible he was, and the finger-wagging just brought back the whole "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" vibe.

The hard fact is that he had numerous opportunities to take out bin Laden and didn't do so. His administration wasn't serious about Islamic terrorism, any more than the preceding administrations going back to Jimmy Carter were. Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton: All were guilty of fecklessness to a greater or lesser degree. However, the political will was not there to deal with Islamic terrorism; the American people wouldn't have supported a major war to stamp it out, prior to 9/11. Indeed, even after 3000 people were murdered on 9/11, there still is a significant portion of the American people who won't support the war on terrorism, because their enemy isn't foreign terrorists but rather the current Republican administration. And that, truly, is a problem. Those who feel more in common with Hugo Chavez than George W. Bush should probably take a good, hard look at themselves, not that it would likely do them any good.

Carter and Reagan, and to a lesser extent Bush 41, at least had the excuse that Islamic terrorism was a secondary priority because the top priority was dealing with the Soviet Union. From 1946-1991, that was the number one foreign policy issue: Containing the Russians. Clinton didn't have that excuse. Instead, he was holding down the no-fly zones in Iraq and conducting a bombing campaign in the Balkans, while trying to deal with the domestic scandals brought on by his personal peccadillos. He was standing on the beach, facing the wrong way as the tsunami approached, and he didn't even see it coming. But the rest of us didn't see it either. Our "holiday from history" mentality wouldn't let us take seriously the "declaration of war" on us by terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.

And so the Towers fell.

Like a lot of people, I don't really care about pointing fingers of blame about what happened prior to 9/11. EVERYBODY dropped the ball, and nobody is blameless. What I care about is where we've gone since 9/11, and what we are doing to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Clinton's self-aggrandizing defensiveness doesn't help.

Beerblogging, Part 1

In which our intrepid writer drinks and reviews assorted beers.

Today, in our first installment of this series, we have Samuel Adams Traditional Ginger Honey Ale.

"Hey, wait a minute!" you say. "I've never seen this in the beer section of my local grocery store." And you probably haven't. It's part of a boxed set of four bottles of traditional colonial recipes, the Samuel Adams Brewer Patriot Collection. The bottles even are numbered 1-4, so that's the order in which I will try them. The other three, in order, are George Washington Porter, James Madison Dark Wheat Ale, and 1790 Root Beer Brew.

Bottle-neck blurb: "True to its colonial heritage, this effervescent golden brew remains unfiltered. The bright flavors of fresh ginger and lemon zest are balanced by a subtle maltiness and the floral sweetness of wildflower honey."

Taste test: Mmmm, not bad. It has a nice amber color and a good head. The ginger taste isn't something I'm used to in beer, but this is pretty good.

A New Record

In the office at work last night, I spotted something unusual: A letter to "Santa Claus, North Pole." Postmarked September 18th. I've never seen one so early in the year. There's a clerk at the Cape Coral station who handles the local letters to Santa, but I don't think that they usually start receiving those letters until November or so. This has to be a new record for earliness.

I think that the little girl who sent it either was confused about the calendar or else just wanted to get a jump on the competition by making sure that her order was first in line to be filled by the elves. I just hope she realizes that she still has another three months of being good still to go.

Arrrrrr!

It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day, me hearties!

Shiver me timbers!

Obligatory Dick Joke Follows

You'll probably see this story discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere today:

Man rejects first penis transplant

Chinese surgeons have performed the world's first penis transplant on a man whose organ was damaged beyond repair in an accident this year. The incident left the man with a 1cm-long stump with which he was unable to urinate or have sexual intercourse. "His quality of life was affected severely," said Dr Weilie Hu, a surgeon at Guangzhou General Hospital. [Ed. - No shit, doc!]

Doctors spent 15 hours attaching a 10cm penis to the 44-year-old patient after the parents of a brain-dead man half his age agreed to donate their son's organ.

...

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis two weeks later. "Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off," Dr Hu said. An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Hmmm... I'm guessing the wife was creeped out by the thought of having sex with a dead guy's penis, even if it was attached to her husband. She probably said something to the effect of "I married you, I didn't marry Mr. Wang."

Disturbing story all the way around.

Sieg Meow?

Just to prove that there is, indeed, a web site for everything out there:

Cats That Look Like Hitler

Really.

In this case, there's a controversy over whether his "mustache" was photoshopped in.

Are We At War Or What?

This really pissed me off when I saw it:

Drone photo said to show Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The U.S. military said it is looking into the unauthorized release of a photo purportedly taken by an American drone aircraft showing scores of Taliban militants at a funeral in Afghanistan.

NBC-TV claimed U.S. Army officers wanted to attack the ceremony with missiles carried by the Predator drone, but were prevented under rules of battlefield engagement that bar attacks on cemeteries.

...

The grainy black and white photo shows what NBC says are some 190 Taliban militants standing in several rows near a vehicle in an open area of land. Gunsight-like brackets were positioned over the group in the photo.

NBC quoted one Army officer who was involved with the spy mission as saying "we were so excited" that the group had been spotted and was in the sights of a U.S. drone.

But the network quoted the officer, who was not identified, as saying that frustration soon set in after the officers realized they couldn't bomb the funeral under the military's rules of engagement.

What the fuck?!?! 190 fucking terrorists all lined up in neat rows and we can't fucking bomb them? Are we at war or what? The misguided humanitarianism of these moronic rules of engagement meant that those 190 Al Qaeda terrorists live to fight and murder another day. How many people will be victims of terrorism in the future, who might not have been if we had had the balls to kill those terrorists when we had the chance? Is the next Mohammed Atta in that grainy picture, planning the next 9/11?

If it had been me, I would have killed those terrorists in a heartbeat, rules of engagement be damned, and if someone wanted to court-martial me, I would have had no problems defending my actions. I attended the 7th Army NCO Academy back in the 1980s, in Bad Toelz, Germany, which was General George S. Patton's final duty assignment. Indeed, the prize for the class distinguished honor graduate was a Patton-style swagger stick. I took Patton's principles to heart while I was there. Patton said "War is a killing business. You must spill the enemy's blood or they will spill yours." In this case, we didn't have the spine to kill the enemy, and we will ultimately reap the fruits of that spinelessness.

This Made Me Laugh

Although it may not be your cup of tea. Cautionary tale stuff:

America Weakly

The Letter to the Editor from Barbra Streisand was spot-on. It was all funny, though, even the horoscopes and Jumble puzzle.

September Triptych, Part Three

And so we come to the final panel of our triptych, the one marked 9/12. The day after. The aftermath. How do we deal with the Muslim world, when a sizable portion of their people seek our destruction?

This last question was the one that President Bush faced as the dust settled on Manhattan, as the fires burned at the Pentagon and in that Pennsylvania field. There are a billion Muslims in the world, give or take. If only 10% of them are "extremists" who aspire to jihad, that would be 100 million of them, which is more than the number of Germans or Japanese that we faced in World War II.

We, as Americans, hold the power to destroy a large chunk of the world's population, in silos in the Great Plains and in submarines prowling the oceans and in heavy bombers that can bring the explosive energy of the sun to any spot on the earth's surface. This would only happen in extremis, of course, or in retaliation for a nuclear explosion in one of our cities. And that, of course, is the true nightmare scenario. Should a mushroom cloud blossom over an American city, political correctness would immediately be dead in this country, and there would be a demand from the American people for immediate vengeance for the hundreds of thousands or millions of American dead. Anyone standing in the way of it would stand a good chance of being lynched from the nearest lamp post. And the end result would be that many, many people across the Islamic world would die.

We do not want a genocide on our conscience, however. We have no desire to annihilate the Muslim world if it can be avoided. The alternative is to change their societies so that killing infidels is no longer acceptable. That is what the war in Iraq was really about: Trying to create a country in the Middle East with liberal (small L) democratic (small D) values, that would become an economic success and not be a threat to its neighbors, and that would no longer champion Muslim terrorism. And of course, we are in a race with time, trying to make the Muslims into reasonable, secular people we can live with, before some of them commit an act so heinous that we have to destroy them. (And don't think that we wouldn't do it, given sufficent provocation; the Jacksonian streak runs deep in the American psyche.)

The results have been mixed. Unlike Germany and Japan after World War II, we did not decisively defeat the Iraqis. We destroyed their military and got rid of Saddam Hussein, but we did not make the average Iraqi feel "defeated" in the way that the average German or Japanese felt defeated in 1945, when his home and his workplace and his life was in ruins. Operation Iraqi Freedom, in contrast, was fought in such a surgical way that after it was over, the average Iraqi didn't feel the need to change his way of life.

Our worst mistake was in not immediately disarming the religious militias. We should have immediately issued a warning that anyone who wasn't in the U.S. or Coalition forces or designated Iraqi military/police forces, and was spotted on the streets with a weapon, would be shot on sight. And then we should have made a few examples. Instead, the Sunni and Shiite militias became the political power brokers in the non-Kurdish parts of Iraq. Rather than creating a secular society in which religion would have been relegated to a secondary role, the militias moved into the power vacuum created with the destruction of the Baathists. Rather than creating a country where murdering infidels was unacceptable, the would-be jihadis are running the show. Iraq has not turned into the showcase of Arab liberal democracy that we needed it to become, because we fought the war in too soft a fashion.

The clock is ticking. And even those on the other side of the aisle should be hoping that President Bush's gambit in Iraq eventually succeeds, because the cost of failure may be more agonizingly high than they can even imagine. If another date someday supplants 9/11 as the red-letter date of tragedy in America, the deaths will not be only on American soil.

September Triptych, Part Two

It is September 11th again, the fifth time we've looked back on that black day. I'm n0t going to recount the events of that day; you can see them or read about them in plenty of other places. I'm not going to write about my feelings on that day, because I've done that before. Instead, today I'll write about the motivation of those who perpetrated the terrorist attacks.

The first thing we heard from many smirking leftist foreigners after the attacks was "Ask yourself why they hate you." The smug leftists figured that the Muslims hated us for the same reasons that they hated us: Because we didn't buy into their socialist, collectivist political views. They were wrong, of course. The Muslims hated us for a completely different set of reasons.

We Americans are unusual in the world, because while we allow freedom of religion to our citizens, we do not have an official state religion. This goes back to the colonial days before the American Revolution, when many people of other denominations objected to having to pay taxes to support the Church of England. The end result was that when we threw off the British yoke, the Framers put it in our Constitution that there would be no established religion. All would be free to worship as they pleased and to support whichever church they might choose. The government would not play favorites, nor tax anyone to support any religion.

This resulted in the rise of numerous different religions across the country. Most were offshoots of various Christian denominations. There arose a tacit agreement among Americans: "I won't criticize your religion, and you won't criticize mine." This led to the key article of faith in the multicultural canon: "All religions are equally good, all philosophies are equally good, all cultures are equally good." Fallacious thinking, obviously, but it was necessary in order to maintain domestic tranquility. Only when a religion seriously violated cultural taboos, such as the Mormons with their polygamy, would the "no criticism" agreement be put aside.

Ultimately, America became a secular nation. This is not to say that Americans are irreligious, because they are not. But for them, religion was not the focal point of their lives. Instead, Americans concentrated on improving their lot in this life, rather than worrying about the hereafter. And for about the past forty years, Americans have been (mostly) hedonists, and American culture has reflected this. Americans are always looking for the next fun, exciting, pleasurable thing to do. They like to eat, they like to drink, they like to have a good time. And they really, really like sex. From skimpy bikinis to raunchy rap music to trashy movies to porn, sex is ubiquitous in our culture. And our culture is just as powerful as our military, the most influential in the world.

Now, there are some people who are not focused on this world, but the next. They believe that they were not put on this earth to seek pleasure or wealth, but to live according to the stern dictates of their god. They believe that those who tempt them with worldly delights, in order to lead them astray from their religious obligations, are evil people. These people worship a variety of gods. Some are fundamentalist Christians. Some are Orthodox Jews. And many, many of them are Muslims of one type or another. All of these people believe that America's culture is a pernicious influence. The difference between them is that the Christians and Jews do not believe that killing Americans will change their culture or at least end the Americans' cultural imperialism. The Muslims, however, seek to do just that, because they do not understand us.

That was why they hated us: Because our secular culture is incompatible with Islam, or more accurately, because Islam is incompatible with modernity. Give a Muslim a chance to come to America and drink beer and go to strip clubs, like the 9/11 hijackers did, and they will do so, and then they will first loathe themselves for their weakness and then turn that loathing outward on the culture that seduced them. And when our culture starts making its way to the Middle East, and the young Muslims start listening to pop music, wearing blue jeans, and getting Western ideas in their heads like free speech, political freedom or choosing their own mates... That's revolutionary. The 9/11 hijackers, Al Qaeda, all of the anti-Western terrorists, they're all striking back at us because their culture cannot compete with ours. Given a choice, their people will choose what we have to offer, rather than a stifling religion. The Muslim leaders don't want their people to have that choice. They want to drive us from the Middle East so that their people can no longer be influenced by us. The world is too small for that now, though.

September Triptych, Part One

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That date is the center panel of the triptych, but there are other panels on each side. The one on the left is marked September 10th; the one on the right is marked September 12th. The events of 9/11 cannot be understood without also understanding how we were in the comparative innocence of 9/10, as well as understanding how we were changed on 9/12. Today, I'll write about the first panel of the triptych, September 10th.

It is rare when we can mark the exact dates that a historical era begins and ends, but we can do so for the "Holiday From History" decade that began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, and ended when the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. That decade seems like a golden age in retrospect, as if encased in amber. We were the world's only remaining superpower and we had reached The End of History, and we had won. The opposing ideology, communism, was discredited and tossed unceremoniously on the ash heap of history. Representative democracy was the wave of the future, and since we no longer had enemies, we could cut our defense budgets and instead use our time and effort to enrich ourselves.

There were some troubling things happening around the margins however, like something on the edge of our peripheral vision. American and coalition military troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia after forcing Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait, and the effect of having "infidels" on "holy" Saudi Arabian soil was to radicalize even further the Wahhabi Muslims who already hated and wanted to kill everyone who didn't follow their particular dark vision of Islam. These hate-filled Muslims began blowing things up, including embassies in Africa and the U.S.S. Cole which was stationed in the waters off Yemen.

This was happening in benighted parts of the world, however, and most Americans just shook their heads and said, "Well, that's just the way those folks over there are," and went on about their business. We didn't like seeing Americans get blown up but it seemed as if people who went into places full of crazy religious fanatics were making their own choice to tempt the fates. We just hoped they were being well-paid to take that risk.

The news media's primary concern was scandal, and fortunately for them, we had a presidential administration which was adept at providing it for them. When the President wasn't in trouble for his freewheeling sexuality, the press managed to find others who were. Even when President Clinton left office and President Bush took over, the media still had all the gravity of a helium balloon, focusing on missing women and sharks biting people. Was there an enemy lurking in the shadows, preparing to strike? They didn't know and if they did, they would have given us something more controversial to get better ratings.

The signs were there, for those who could read them. But dealing with the incipient problem in any way other than lobbing a couple of cruise missiles could have led to dead Americans, which Clinton wanted to avoid at all costs. Bad for his legacy and all that. There were opportunities to take out Osama Bin Laden, and Clinton failed to take advantage of his opportunities during his eight years in power. Bush, in contrast, had less than eight months in power before 9/11, and most of his political appointments had not yet been approved, hobbling the early months of his administration. Bush was not blameless for not getting Bin Laden in his first eight months, but a lot more blame accrues to Clinton, who had much more time and several known opportunities to take him out.

It comes down to this, though: Would getting rid of Bin Laden prior to 9/11 have prevented the attacks? The answer is "probably not," because while he was the main guy in charge of Al Qaeda, he was not their only leader. Just as assassinating Adolf Hitler wouldn't have ended World War II, because there were a lot of other adherents to his evil ideology. We only won World War II after we (and the Soviets and our other Allies) killed a whole lot of Germans, and the ones who survived decided that they didn't want to be Nazis any more because it had led to the destruction of their nation. We didn't try to "change hearts and minds," we just killed them and kept killing them until they all gave up.

Chocolate

I watched "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" on one of the cable movie channels yesterday. I thought it was pretty good, and that director Tim Burton's version was probably closer to the spirit of the book than "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Johnny Depp was more than a bit creepy, in a Michael Jackson-esque way, in the Willy Wonka role, and definitely more disturbing than when Gene Wilder played the role in the original movie. It was hard to believe it was the same actor who played Captain Jack Sparrow in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

Continuing today's chocolate theme, I spotted a couple of new types of hot cocoa mix at the store this morning and decided to try them out. The new brand is Cacao Reserve by Hershey's. How new is the brand? The web site currently only has the title page (although it does link to other Hershey's sites).

Anyway, they had two varieties to choose from: Mayan Blend Classic Chocolate and Aztec Blend Mildly Spiced Chocolate. Each box had five 'sachets' (not 'packets', if you please!) which would make a 6 ounce cup of hot cocoa.

My curiosity aroused, I decided to get one box of each. I just had one cup of each variety, and thought they both were pretty good. The Mayan Blend has a robust chocolate flavor that is somewhere between milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate. Think of the flavor of a cup of chocolate fudge pudding and you'll get a close approximation. The Aztec Blend is something else indeed. The package doesn't say what the spices are, but they don't seem to be cinnamon or any of the other usual suspects. Perhaps cardamom? I liked it, but the taste of the spices was fairly bold for being "mildly spiced." Not in an unpleasant way, however.

My guess is that you'd either say, "Mmmm, this is really good," and finish the cup, or else you would say, "Interesting," set down that cup and pick up the other one with the Mayan Blend. The boxes were a bit over two bucks apiece, which is a little more expensive than the garden variety hot chocolate mix, but not so much more as to make you think you were buying a Ferrari or something.

Doing My Civic Duty

Yesterday was primary election day here in Florida. Turnout was very light, only about 17% of registered voters in my county. Unlike many others, however, I did my civic duty by voting in the Republican primary contests as well as the non-partisan ones.

This morning, after looking at the results, all I can say is "Don't blame me, I voted for McBride." Unfortunately, Katherine Harris's three opponents split the anti-theocracy Republican vote, and Harris got a bare 50% to win the nomination to run against incumbent Democrat Senator Bill Nelson in November. Even Harris's gaffe the other day wasn't enough for one of the other candidates to pass her. Too bad.

I have a really unpleasant choice to make in November, because I don't much care for her style, but I'm not going to vote for a liberal Democrat as long as there are crazy Muslims who want to kill us all. I guess I'll have to hold my nose and vote for Ms. Harris. Lesser of two evils and all that.

Hurricanes and Hubris

106 years ago today, a tropical storm swirled over Havana, Cuba. The U.S. Weather Bureau forecasters in Cuba (which America had taken from Spain in the Spanish-American War a couple of years earlier) declared that the storm would recurve north and make landfall in the Tampa area, then cross Florida and move up the east coast. The local Cuban forecasters, who had been studying and predicting the courses of tropical storms for centuries, said that the storm was actually a hurricane, and that it was heading west, not north. The Americans were wrong, and that storm crossed the Gulf of Mexico, moving over the Loop Current and exploding into the deadliest hurricane in American history. Three days later, it struck Galveston, Texas, destroying most of the city and killing several thousand people.

I finished Isaac's Storm yesterday morning. It's unusual for me to rip through a book in three or four days like that, but it was an engrossing tale and I had some free time to read.

Perhaps the most striking thing to someone in the early 21st Century is how certain those end-of-the-19th Century weather forecasters were of what they knew and of how much information they thought they had. They were making their forecasts based on barometers to measure changes in air pressure, thermometers to measure changes in temperature, anemometers to measure wind speed and direction, and rain gauges to measure rainfall. They had a general idea of the way that weather moved from one place to another, generally from west to east.

Their forecasts, however, were often woefully inaccurate. The prediction for New York City on March 12, 1888, for example, was "colder, fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather." That was the day of the Blizzard of '88, when New York got 21 inches of snow, Albany got nearly four feet of snow, and about four hundred people died in the northeast from the storm.

You'd think this would have made them more humble, but it just made them more secretive and competitive, considering weather information to be secret information that shouldn't be given out to laymen or competitors like the Cubans. And of course, they weren't going to listen to a bunch of superstitious primitives who were always overreacting to tropical storms and declaring them "hurricanes." No, there would be none of that. Only the head of the Weather Bureau was authorized to do so. And so Galveston had no warning of the storm bearing down upon it, and the city was wrecked.

Today, we have much more information available to us. We have a whole cable channel devoted to nothing but the weather. From my computer, I can look at satellite images of storms hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, and can track their paths as they meander westward. But in the end, we often don't know much more about what their eventual courses will be than those weather pioneers with their antique instruments did. And even when we do know, sometimes people refuse to listen. Hurricane Katrina last year was a classic example. The people of New Orleans knew that one bad mother of a storm was coming their way, that they lived in a bowl below sea level, and yet many of them still stayed, even though many of them did have cars and could have evacuated. They could see the satellite loop on the Weather Channel, watching it spiraling ever closer. And still they stayed put.

The citizens of Galveston at least had the excuse of not knowing what those mysteriously rising waters flowing through their streets portended. They had no idea that there was a Category 4 or 5 hurricane bearing down on them, bringing winds estimated at 150 miles per hour and pushing a storm surge of fifteen or twenty feet directly at a city whose highest point was only eight feet above sea level. Nobody knew at the time that storm surge is the deadliest part of a hurricane, not the high winds. And so there was the absurdity of the men of Galveston trying to carry on as if there was nothing unusual happening.

And then the tidal wave came. Think of the destruction from the tsunami of December 2004, with the waves rolling through towns like a battering ram, knocking one building into the next into the next and pulverizing them all into a high wall of rubble. That is what Galveston looked like the morning after the hurricane. The suffering of the survivors can hardly be overstated. The city stank of death, from the thousands of decomposing bodies. They were unable to bury all of them, so at first they tried to bury the corpses at sea, but they just returned to Galveston on a ghoulish tide. Then, they were forced to burn the bodies on massive funeral pyres.

Galveston today is a small city compared to the nearby metropolis of Houston, but in 1900, they were about the same size and in strong competition for the role of chief port in south Texas. In 1900, before the hurricane, Galveston was the nation's fourth busiest port and was a major shipping port for American cotton, as well as a glitzy, glamorous vacation destination for the wealthy. Some called it "the New York of the South". Galveston had boomed, with a 30% increase since the 1890 census pushing the population to about 40,000. Somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people died in the hurricane in Galveston, and in 1910, the city had only just regained the size it had in 1900. The Houstonians dredged Buffalo Bayou, opening their city up to seagoing traffic. And then, four months after the hurricane, a gusher of oil was found at Spindletop, and Houston's future was secured. Galveston was doomed to stay in Houston's shadow, a beach playground community for its larger neighbor.

Crikey! Crocodile Hunter's Luck Runs Out

Those of us who like watching nature shows on television are mourning the tragic death of Steve Irwin, television's "Crocodile Hunter," who was killed by a stingray while filming an underwater documentary off the northeast coast of Australia.

I guess, in the end, he probably would have wanted to go like that, although not so soon. Thrillseekers seldom die at home in bed of old age. When it's your time to go, it's your time to go. Rest in peace, Steve.

What I'm Reading Today

I called my mom yesterday on the phone before I went to have lunch with my dad. Mom and I talked about what was going on in the news, and I mentioned Super Typhoon Ioke hitting Wake Island with 155-mile per hour winds, and waves/storm surge that were predicted to be a cumulative 50 feet high, washing over an island whose highest elevation is only 18 feet.

Mom then recommended a book to me about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, Isaac's Storm. She seemed a bit surprised that I hadn't read it, although I had read some articles on the web about that hurricane a few years back. I told her I'd check the library on the way to lunch to see if they had a copy.

Well, they had two, one in hardback and one in paperback. I checked out the hardback, and I'm about halfway through it. It has a lot of interesting information about the physics of hurricanes, as well as the human drama of what happens when a catastrophic hurricane strikes a vulnerable city.

I was especially fascinated by the fact that the story's protagonist, Isaac Cline, who ran the Weather Bureau office in Galveston, had previously been stationed in west Texas and had gone through Abilene (my hometown) in 1885. The description of the town at that time, on page 59, was quite evocative. I also lived for a while in La Marque, Texas, which is not far at all from Galveston. Indeed, we used to go to the beach at Galveston when I was a little boy and walk along the huge seawall which now protects the city from disastrous storm surges like the one that killed so many people in 1900.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I'd recommend it for anyone who lives in a hurricane-prone area, and even for those who don't live along the coast but who still like a good non-fiction yarn.

So Where the Heck is...

Åland? That's what we were wondering last night when we spotted a letter with foreign postage from "Åland." It looked like the language was Swedish, but a Swedish stamp would have said "Sverige." One stamp had a ladybug, the other a white-furred ermine. Well, Google searches work wonders, even if your A key doesn't have the little circle on the top. It turns out that Åland is "a demilitarised Swedish-speaking region" off the east coast of Sweden that actually is part of Finland but is mostly autonomous. Population: About 26,000. It looks like it would be an interesting place to visit, but only in the summer, of course. I like the little coats of arms for each of the 16 municipalities. It reminds me of the various ones that each of the districts in Berlin have.

Ernesto: Plenty of Nothing

Ernesto is officially a bust. Nothing but a bit of a breeze and a few sprinkles. Almost all of the schools in nearby counties are closed today (Charlotte County, which was hammered by Hurricane Charlie in 2004, is the lone exception), and most government offices as well. The mail, however, will be delivered.

I've seen worse weather driving to work on a thundery night. And that suits me just fine. A disaster averted is a good thing.

Ernesto: Fizzle?

The guys on The Weather Channel in places like Islamorada and Miami Beach say that not much is happening there yet with the storm approaching. Some rain, some gusty wind, but nothing intense and long-lasting. I called my work hotline number and as of the last update on the recording at 6:00 p.m., it's business as usual. The peak of the storm is supposed to hit our area around 8 to 9 a.m., which is just after I drive home. We're on the weak side of the storm, but I suspect tomorrow's drive home will be a pain in the neck, so if they offer a chance to leave early, I'll take it. Weather.com shows predicted peak sustained winds for tomorrow morning both for work and for where I live at about 27 mph. That's nothing compared to Charlie or Wilma.

More in the morning when I get home from work.

Offered Without Comment

Woman Crashes When Teaching Dog to Drive

A woman in Hohhot, the capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson, the official Xinhua News Agency said Monday.

No injuries were reported although both vehicles were slightly damaged, it said.

The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive," according to Xinhua.

"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."

Xinhua did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved but Li paid for repairs.

Track Watching

Like most Floridians, I keep a watchful eye on what's going on in the tropics during hurricane season. And so I've been watching the projected track of Ernesto (currently a tropical storm, although it may regain hurricane status later) as it crossed Haiti and as it prepares to cross Cuba.

Originally, it looked like the storm would hit Jamaica and pass south of Cuba, then head into the Gulf of Mexico and menace the Texas or Louisiana coast. As each day has passed and each new update arrives from the National Hurricane Center, however, the track has moved further and further east. Suddenly, a storm that wasn't supposed to affect us at all was headed directly toward us.

Last night's 8 p.m. update had the storm moving right off the coast to our west, and making landfall somewhere around Venice, to our north. The 11 p.m. update was even scarier, with the storm coming right over the top of us. However, this morning, the center line is now tracking even further east, and it looks like we'll catch the western edge of the storm as it tracks up the middle of the peninsula towards Lake Okeechobee. We're still in the cone of uncertainty, of course, and hurricanes rarely move in straight lines, but it's better to be on the west side of the cone when the track has been consistently moving eastward. And of course, the strongest winds and heaviest rainfall usually are in the northeast quadrant of a hurricane. If the current track continues, that's very bad news for Miami-West Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale, because they could catch the brunt of the storm, and especially bad news if the storm should suddenly intensify when it exits Cuba.

At this point, I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be going to work Wednesday night and that the power (please, God!) will stay on. I've got my hurricane supplies ready. Hopefully I won't need them.

Bad Judgment?

Here in Florida, the judges on county courts and state circuit courts are elected by the voters. Indeed, a lot of the mail I've processed lately has been campaign literature for judicial candidates. I don't know how they do it in Indiana, but I would not vote for the judge in the following AP story:

Judge Detains 5 Over Ringing Cell Phone

CROWN POINT, Ind. - A judge detained and questioned a row of spectators when a cell phone rang for a third time in her courtroom, later ordering two people to serve community service for contempt of court.

When no one admitted having the ringing phones Wednesday, Lake County Criminal Court Judge Diane Boswell told all five people in the row to sit in chairs reserved for jail inmates. They stayed there for more than an hour until the morning court call ended.

Boswell found three people in contempt of court because they initially refused to say who had the ringing phones.

Cynthia Cannon of Gary agreed to pay a $100 fine after admitting that her phone was one of those that went off. The judge ordered her to do community service, but Cannon declined, saying she can't work or sit for long periods of time due to a disability.

Verdell Berry Jr., of Merrillville, said he had two phones. One was off, the other he turned off when Boswell warned the gallery about the phones. The sound of it powering down is what she heard, Berry said.

He admitted he didn't speak up to explain that when Boswell first asked.

Shonique Freeman, of Gary, said she knew it was Berry's phone, but she didn't offer the information, either.

Boswell ordered both Berry and Freeman to serve 40 hours of community service.

"The next time you come to court, don't bring your cell phone," Boswell said. "And when the court asks a question, answer the question."

Now, I don't have a problem with the judge punishing the boorish behavior of the cell phone owners. They should have turned the phones off before going into the courtroom, and pretty much deserved what they got. However, I have to question the judge's cognitive ability, because after she made Ms. Cannon sit in a chair for over an hour, the woman tells her "I have a disability that won't let me work or sit for long periods of time" and the judge believed it! And so Ms. Cannon gets off with a $100 fine, while the other two have forty hours of community service. I'll tell you, my time is worth a hell 0f a lot more than $2.50 an hour, so I'd rather pretend to be a gimp and pay the fine, too. Sorry, Judge, I don't think you're bright enough to be interpreting the law.

Eggheads Downsize Solar System!

Planet unemployment up 11%! Reid, Pelosi: Bush to Blame!

Astronomers Say Pluto Is Not a Planet

End of a world: Women, minorities, astrologers hardest hit

Okay, I'll Admit It...

I really like some commercials. Lately, it's been the "What's In Your Wallet?" credit card people. I love the pillagers, and the one where they formed a band called "The Pillage People"... priceless.

I saw one on ESPN a couple of nights ago (and again just now) for Nike, featuring lovely tennis player Maria Sharapova walking past New Yorkers who serenade her with "I Feel Pretty" on the way to her match. It's actually pretty clever. If you haven't seen it yet, here is a link to the commercial on the Nike site. Enjoy.

Update: Note that you have to click on the MIDDLE picture at the bottom of the screen (the one where Maria's wearing the plum-colored blouse) to watch that particular video clip.

Later: Is that Jack Nicholson driving the cab?

Speaking of Multiculturalism...

I read an online article yesterday about the upcoming season of "Survivor," in which the four initial teams will be divided by race. There will be a black team, a white team, an Asian team and a Latino team. The show's producers say that they are doing it because they got complaints that the show didn't have enough "diversity." This will put an end to those complaints.

Now, I haven't watched the show since its original incarnation in 2000. Once was enough for me; I didn't feel like watching the same script played out by different actors, even if it was on a slightly different set. Still, this is an interesting wrinkle on how to divvy up the contestants. I know that during at least one of the show's 12 "seasons" (they grow two crops a year; reality television is fertile ground) they initially divided the contestants up by sex.

There was a discussion about this on ESPN Radio last night while I was driving in to work, and both of the guys were aghast, thinking it a horrible idea. "Not politically correct," they observed. It will, however, make people talk around the water cooler. Controversy draws attention.

I guess the question is whether any one particular ethnic group would have an advantage in any of the particular types of competition. My guess would be "probably not," because these will be individual members of those groups, who may or may not have the stereotypical strengths and weaknesses that their groups are thought to possess. In the end, the advantage usually accrues to those who are young, fit and have some kind of useful skill. One should not forget the aphorism about "age and treachery," however.

Any Color You Want, As Long As It's...

Ah, sweet absurdity. This one will make you laugh.

At work, the Diversity Committee has been sponsoring a little weekly contest all through August for "Multicultural Month." They show a picture of a celebrity or celebrities, who must be identified along with their cultural "heritage." They included a few hints about the country. Well. You would think that something called the "Diversity Commitee" would be hypersensitive to making sure that all of the major ethnic groups were represented in the contest. But you would be thinking wrong.

The first week, the celebrity was Angelina Jolie (French). The second week, the celebrity was Antonio Banderas (Spanish). At that point, I had to challenge the person running the contest for being Euro-centric and non-inclusive by writing up a little sign and putting it next to the entry box. "Where are the Africans? Where are the Asians? Where are the Antarcticans?" I asked, tongue firmly in cheek. I then demanded that Chilly Willy the penguin be chosen for Week 3, in order to acknowledge the aspirations of Antarctican-Americans.



"We demand more diversity in our multi-culturalism," I said. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

Well, you'd think it would have been a teachable moment. Again, you'd think wrong. Instead of Chilly Willy, they chose three Italians. Now comes week four, and what do we get? The Irish! In four weeks, they have chosen people of European descent four times. And in this case, they've chosen four nationalities who might see each other at Sunday Mass at the local Catholic church. I don't know how the Polish got left out!

When Henry Ford came out with the Model T Ford, he said that customers could have their Model T in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. Apparently we can have our multiculturalism in any color we want, as long as it is white.

Where's Denzel Washington or Wesley Snipes? Can't a brother get a break? What about Yao Ming? Nobody of the Asian persuasion?

It's kind of like going to the ice cream shop and ordering scoops of four different types of vanilla ice cream. "I'll have vanilla, French vanilla, vanilla vanilla-ripple and vanilla fudge chunk." That's vanilla fudge, mind you.

And this is the friggin' "Diversity Committee" running this! The people running the program aren't with the program!

The mind boggles.

Spotted in the Mail #2

It's my bicentennial 200th post, so before the world ends tomorrow (courtesy of the evil Iranians), we'll have a light-hearted post today.

It's all about finding your niche. There are people out there who want to buy just about everything, and you can make a living if you have the product that they want.

Case in point: I saw a postcard in the mail today from a company selling "animal-friendly" yoga mat bags. Here is a link to their boutique page, showing the various types of yoga mat bags. It is, of course, located in New York, although I suppose that it could just as easily have been in Los Angeles or San Francisco. There has to be a critical mass of yoga devotees who have a yoga mat and need a fashionable-but-animal-friendly bag in which to carry it around. Well, I wish the folks at RoZCoo success. It's the American way: Build a better yoga mat bag and the world will beat a path to your door, or in this case, your web site.

The lovely model is Catie Parker, whose web site link was also listed on the postcard, as well as that of the photography company that took the pictures. I like the music on Catie's web site, but the meowing cat when you click on the links might be a bit too cutesie...

Why I Love the New York Post

The great headlines, of course! You might have seen the story about the Israeli woman whose life was saved by her silicone breast implants. The Post's headline: 'Rack' saves gal from ruin.

Sometimes they verge on genius.

The Party Purges Thought Criminal Lieberman

News from yesterday's primary: The Democrats in Connecticut have purged one of the few remaining voices of sanity and civility in their party, as millionaire challenger and left-wing anti-war candidate Ned Lamont defeated incumbent Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman.

To me, it was all reminiscent of George Orwell's novel 1984. Lieberman was obviously guilty of insufficient orthodoxy to the fundamental principles of Demsoc (Principle #1: "Hate George W. Bush before all others"), and no doubt of thoughtcrime as well. Unlike most of the members of the Party, he didn't take part in the daily "Two Minutes Hate", in which the despised visage of George W. "Goldstein" Bush would appear on the telescreens to induce paroxysms of insane fury among the party faithful. That right there showed dangerous unorthodoxy. He just didn't bellyfeel Demsoc.

And the thoughtcrime: His failure to understand that the true enemies of the Party were not the Islamofascist terrorists who flew jet airplanes into skyscrapers or two-bit tinhorn dictators or mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, but rather the Republicans. Yes, it was the Republicans who were worthy only of rancor and venom, according to Democrat Party chief Howard Dean, whose quotes included "I hate Republicans." Civility, working together across the aisle for the benefit of the country, no, there could be none of that. There was no room for compromise. The Party was at war with the Republicans; the Party had always been at war with the Republicans. The Ministry of Truth (aka Reuters - haha, just kidding!) told them so. Eurasia, Eastasia, eh, they could take care of themselves. Not the Party's problem.

And so, the thought criminal Lieberman was purged, sent to Room 101 in an attempt to make him confess his many crimes. But a funny thing may happen in November: The proles may get a chance to vote for him as an independent. Not that it would really change anything, of course. One sane, civil Senator is not enough to redeem a Party.

You've Got to Be Kidding Me

You would have thought that the anti-Bush drive-by media would have found everything possible to criticize about the President by now, but ABC News has blazed new territory: How Much Is Too Much: Is the President Too Chunky?

Folks, this is what a fat President looks like. I'll bet that President Taft could probably have kept up with Babe Ruth in a hot dog eating contest, although both would probably have been defeated by 144-pound Takeru Kobayashi.

Lighten up, ABC.

"Speaking Lebanese"?

The talking head gal on Fox News just noted that the Lebanese guy who was yakking "live" was "speaking Lebanese." I just rolled my eyes. I'm guessing that he was speaking Arabic, but hey, that's just me.

I'm flashing on the Vapors' "Turning Japanese." I really think so...

Second Positive

The results are in. Floyd Landis' second urine sample also tested positive. Dude! Did you really think you could get away with it? It's amazing the stuff they can do with spectroscopy these days. They can tell from which field in Peru that a coca leaf came from, for Pete's sake. Did you think they couldn't tell the difference between natural and synthetic testosterone?

Speaking of stupid, how about this new UN draft resolution between the USA and France regarding the war between the Israelis and Hezbollah? Last I saw, the USA and France weren't the ones fighting. The UN is pretty much worthless for making or keeping peace, worthless as tits on a boar hog. If you see the blue helmets coming, you should run, not walk, in the other direction, because a best-case scenario usually means that the "peacekeepers" will be sexually molesting your women and children in exchange for food and water. A worst-case scenario usually means genocide (Rwanda, Bosnia, etc). Personally, I want to see the Israelis keep killing terrorists. Dead terrorists don't cause any problems in the future.

"The Life Grew Better and More Cheerful"

While writing about Castro the other day, and comparing him and his elderly brother to the geriatric Soviet leadership in the mid-1980s, I went on an internet link odyssey.

First, while I remembered Andropov as the short-lived successor to Brezhnev, I drew a blank on the guy who came after him and before Gorbachev. Well, the internet search engines can find anything, anything at all, that you might want to know about. The Wikipedia entry for the Soviet Union gave me a nice list of the leaders of the Soviet Union. And the winner is: Chernenko! Both Andropov and Chernenko lasted just over a year apiece before dying in office, which had to have been expensive for the CPSU, since they would have had to print up a bunch of new pictures and send them out to all of the party functionaries to put up on their walls.

All of the other vital information about the Soviet Union was on the main Wikipedia page, including a musical link for the national anthem. Alas, my computer doesn't have whatever program plays .ogg files. However, another quick internet search took me to an archived article from radio station WFMU's blog, with a link to a Windows Media video file for the Hymn of the Soviet Union. It even has English subtitles, and the words are oh-so-ironic. "Sing to the Motherland, home of the free," indeed.

Even more interesting was a link to Lev Borodulin's "Rarities of the USSR Photochronicles" page. If you've got the time, look through the galleries at the old black-and-white pictures. Warning: Do not look at this picture! Don't say I didn't warn you! A 1930s-era Soviet bikini (yes, I know there were no bikinis yet at that time) is a very scary sight. And doesn't the fellow who is pointing in the picture over the gallery title "The life grew better and more cheerful" look a lot like Alan Alda?

So do you ever feel nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War? Things were so much simpler then. It was us vs. the Evil Empire, and while the peaceniks were advocating unilateral disarmament, and mopes like Sting were singing that "there's no such thing as a winnable war, it's a lie we don't believe any more", a funny thing happened: We won. We outspent the Soviets into submission; we could afford guns and butter, they couldn't. The Soviet Union withered away in the way that the capitalist countries were supposed to do when true communism had been achieved. Sort of like what Jackson Browne sang about in "Lawyers in Love" back in 1983:

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will
Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon,
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for lawyers in love

Almost prescient. Of course, the Russians themselves and the various peoples in the other successor nations are still there. It was just the Soviet government that had disappeared. It was almost the diametric opposite of a neutron bomb.

After it happened and the strange new world of 1992 appeared, we suddenly realized that we had been pushing hard against something that we hadn't didn't know was there. It was only the abrupt absence of resistance and the lurch we felt when we kept pushing for that one moment, that caused us to understand how hard we had been pushing.

In a post-9/11 world, it seems in retrospect like it was a much less complicated world, and much less dangerous than it seemed at the time. Of course, we know in hindsight that we weren't going to get annihilated by the Soviet nuclear arsenal, that the peaceniks were woefully wrong, that the "99 Red Balloons" alarmists had bet on the wrong horse. Because of the way things turned out, Ronald Reagan is remembered as a visionary, not a dangerous warmonger. It's not often that you get that kind of swift historical judgment.

Talkin' About My G-G-Generation

The Boomers aren't the only ones getting old. Cuban dictador Fidel Castro seems to be full of incipient mortality, to the delight of the Cuban exile community in Miami. The 79-year-old tyrant just underwent intestinal surgery, and has handed off power to his 75-year-old kid brother, Raul. Just temporarily, so they say.

No "get well" message from Washington, of course. The European Union sent a nice one, though:

"We wish that President Fidel Castro and Cuban democracy (have) a quick recovery, that's all we can say," EU spokesman Pietro Petrucci said.

Ouch! For "Cuban democracy" to recover, they need to have Jesus go down there to the tomb and say, "Lazarus, come forth!"

It must be lonely being a communist these days. The Soviet Union is history, as are all of the Iron Curtain dictatorships of the proletariat. China has gone all heretical, and while still autocratic, seems to have embraced capitalist concepts like "trade." Nobody left but the pariahs in North Korea and Cuba, aging devotees of a discredited religion.

And the best successor that the Bearded One can come up with is his 75-year-old brother. Nepotism. Charming. At least we're allowed to elect our own leaders from our leading political families like the Bushes and Kennedys and Clintons, and we're free not to vote for them as well. No such choice in Cuba. The aging Cuban leadership reminds me of nothing so much as the Soviet gerontocracy in the 1980s after Brezhnev died. I think that Lenin's still under glass in Red Square, fifteen years after the Soviet Union crumbled into dust. Maybe Fidel can get a similar mausoleum for himself in Havana. I suspect they'd need a splash shield for it, though, when all those exiles eventually come back and turn it into an open-air urinal.

Tasty Treats

Sometimes you're at the store and you see something new that looks good, so you buy it on impulse. That's what happened to me the other day when I spotted the new Caribou Coffee Chewy Granola Bars in the snack food section. I bought a box of the Chocolate Mocha flavored bars, and I must say that they are, indeed, tasty. When I opened the foil wrapper, I was rewarded with the savory eye-opening scent of coffee. The chocolate mocha layer at the bottom of the bar goes very well with the granola. If you like chocolate, coffee and granola, then you'll probably want to try them. Don't expect them to replace your morning cup 'o Joe, though, because they only have about 5 milligrams of caffeine, compared to about 85 milligrams in a cup of coffee, according to this article I read about the Caribou Coffee bars. And no, I'd never heard of Caribou Coffee before.