Victory Soap v. 2.0

(Image via Ghost of a Flea's Myspace site.)

Yep, I've gone back to Movable Type, and re-opened Victory Soap. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be a case of "I'm gonna wash that blog right out of my hair." MT has let me down before, but I'm a woman, and I can't completely escape the need to give cads and scallawags a second (third, fourth) chance. Fortunately I have turned this failing onto blogging software instead of male human beings.

As for how easy it is to set up a blog in Movable Type version 3x, I'll just post an early "test" comment of mine: "Jesus Christ, setting up comment authentication was like pulling a station wagon down the road with my tits." Yep, it was like that. But the site is up, and seems to be working.

A few things: the stylesheet is dark, I know, but it's one of the few that Movable Type provides that I like. It used to be relatively easy to fiddle with MT stylesheets -- now, not so much. I use their "Stylecatcher" plugin, and if setting up comments was difficult, I don't know what to call the crazy manoeuvering I had to do to get this plugin working, and I can't even get the one stylesheet I really like (the "forest green" one) to work at all. (For some reason all the other ones -- even the ones with images -- work just fine.)

As for the commenting... I am not entirely please with the Typekey-registration thing. I realize it's a pain in the ass. But every time I visit a blog with unmoderated comments, I am reinforced in my vow to never, ever, have open comments again. Of course, I realize that there are plenty of unpleasant people who have Typekey IDs, but I also have first-time comment moderation set up (that means the first time anyone comments here their comment will be held in a moderation queue), so I can ban anyone who attempts to misuse the privilege of commenting here. On the other hand, I have heard that spammers can take real advantage of the Movable Type comment scripts, so I may just change to an outside system, like Haloscan, that has a comment moderation setup. I don't know.

Trackbacks have been turned off and will never be turned on. They are a spam attractor. If you want me to know you've posted on something here just drop a line in comments. Or email me (go to the main page of the site for my email address).

That's all I can think of for now. I don't really know what direction this blog will be going in, if a personal blog can be said to have a "direction." My life doesn't really have a direction -- my personal goals are few and modest and not really interesting to the general public. My only vague resolution is to stop nattering on about my every little health problem, as I think last year's blog descended to that point often. It's boring, and old-ladyish in a way I don't want to be (I aspire towards the crusty, self-sufficient spinster sort of old lady, not the needy, whiny, sickly sort).

That being said, that doesn't mean I'm not going to talk about my life at all. Here's the latest: I was able to finally, thanks to everyone's generous donations to my Paypal and Amazon begging bowls, able to buy the platform bed I've been wanting. And I was able to get a decent bargain on a better bed than I could have gotten on the internet by getting my butt out the door and into one of the local outlets. So I ended up with a full-size hardwood bed instead of a pine, for less than the pine bed cost. It gets delivered this coming Saturday and soon my futon will be on a stable surface instead of a creaking, wobbly old futon frame. Thank you all!

Cats update: the outdoor cat is a little better, though she does not like getting her pill at all. And she still isn't eating much -- I can't tell if it's because she's still off her feed, or if she just doesn't care for the expensive special cat food. I may cut some of her favorite store brand into the expensive food to see if that will get her to eat more. She's also still drinking a lot of water, which worries me because the vet said it could be a sign of failing kidneys. Oh well -- it's only been a little over a week, so hopefully the treatment will get her back on an even keel. To make matters more fun, one of the neighbor cats (who is young and well fed and has a collar) came around night before last and was harassing her. I was woken up about 2:30 am by yowls and hisses, and ended up getting very little sleep because I had to keep getting up to throw water on the invader. (Or near the invader -- I need to get a water pistol from the dollar store.) Comedy moment: every time I'd chase the invader away, O.C. would go out into some part of the grounds and pee. "MY territory!"

As for Xena (my indoor kitty), she's still in the rudest of health though I've decided to make a vet appointment for her -- she's overdue. She's taken to sitting on my desk in between me and my laptop, which is nice and cuddly, but makes it hard to type.

Weather is cloudy here, and it's going to rain at some point. I think I'll walk over to Walmart before the clouds break. Later, my peeps. (And remember, if you leave a comment and it doesn't show up immediately be patient -- I'll upload all new comments when I get back.)

Over there on the right you'll see Choppin' Dude -- a somewhat updated version, I got it from this website -- warning, about fifteen ad popups may open. (The old Choppin' Dude has disappeared from my server and is not stored on the laptop -- he's probably on one of my image cds or floppies, but I have a million of the things so I am not going to look through all of them. Categorize and list stuff on floppies and cds? What's that mean?)

Anyway, that's for Scott and his kind words. I guess this blog is taking on a somewhat martial air. Gee, where did that come from? ::innocent stare::

In further news, it's a cloudy, gloomy day still. I thought of taking a walk, but I don't really have the urge to do so. I did go to Walmart earlier -- surprisingly, it was not crowded. Everyone must have partied extra hard last night. I still have plenty of the Korbel left over. To tell you the truth I was rather disappointed in it -- it is sourish and almost beery. I might as well have bought a couple of bottles of André and at least got the sweet taste I prefer in my champagne. I guess I could use the rest of the bottle to make champagne cocktails or Kir Royales or something. I wonder if the liquor store is open...

I've decided to put away the indoor Christmas decorations. What can I say, I'm already over it. The outside lights are staying a while, though. It was a bitch getting those things up, and I like colored lights.

I've also decided to move some furniture around. New year, new(ish) look for the place, etc. The tv was sitting on top of a lame, beat-up old cart -- one of those pasteboard things with wheels and two shelves that they sell at Walmart. I've decided to put the tv on the tall Danish-style cupboard-with-shelves things that I bought at the second-hand furniture store a year or so ago. It was in the dining area, so I dragged it over to the living room area, after taking all the typewriters off it. (That was what was on the shelf unit before.) The tv is just a substitute for the flat panel I'm going to get some day -- not so much because I am trendy as because it's all part of my stripping-down plan. I'm going to get a flat-panel lcd tv that is not more than 20 inches big. And then I'll cart the crappy old tv to the dumpster. Of course, it's not a priority, as I don't watch enough tv for it to matter. By the time I'm ready to buy the flat panel they should have gone down in price even more. But I don't want a huge one -- I think huge tvs in little apartments are just embarrassing, and I don't watch that much tv.

All this, of course, means I've had to move a million things around, and I'll probably be sore as hell tomorrow. Don't care. I've got ibuprofen and wine.

I just realized I forgot to put in a tag which shows which category my posts are going into. Well, so far they've all gone into the "Blah Blah Blah" category. I don't know why MT is never set up with the tags already in the template as a default, but that's is the wonderful world of MT for you. Wordpress had weirdnesses too.

Dang, I am too tired to really get into a discussion of the issues brought up in this post of TigerHawk's. It's too bad, because he's talking about something I've been wanting to get into writing about for a long time: how our society (by which I mean American society and Western society in general, though the American part of it is the only part I really have the authority to talk about) has changed in its attitude towards risk from a "risk is necessary and even good" viewpoint to a "risk bad! stay at home lock doors hide under bed!" viewpoint.

I'll at least try to get into some of it. Here's how I express my own point of view: I am a Captain Kirk girl as opposed to a Captain Picard girl. One of the main themes of the original Star Trek is the idea that human beings needed risk and adventure, often expressed as "freedom" but usually more openly admitted to be the need to have obstacles to overcome, rivals to compete against, and dangerous tasks to take on, in order to not stagnate and then decay and die out. How many episodes shows the OST crew landing on some paradise where ostensibly their every wish was granted but which turned out to be a trap of one sort or other? True, there was that one episode, "The Menagerie," where the crippled space captain ended up living a life of "illusion" in a "healed" body -- but even that show was geared towards the idea that even the illusion of free movement and physical fitness is preferable if reality consists of paralysis and constant medical care.

However, by the time they decided to resurrect the series (and I glom all the new STs -- Next Generation, Deep Space 9, etc. -- into one grouping, because the same overarching themes governed all the shows, with the exception of Enterprise, which I have not seen an episode of), times had changed and so had attitudes, so what we ended up with is a "future" where the characters were too busy questioning their own motives to get anything done; "superior" beings (such as "Q" -- one of the better characters in the new series, or at least one of the few really confident ones, until they decided he needed to question himself too), instead of being hoist on their own petard, were shown as being basically right about humanity and who had to be coaxed into giving us a "second chance"; war-weariness instead of eagerness to fight for a cause; lots of multicultural twaddle (Klingons turned into gruff teddy bears aliens, even Romulans weren't allowed to be good, old-fashioned enemies, the crew of the Enterprise had to understand them too); and lots and lots of therapy-speak with made-up alien neuroses sometimes, but not always, standing in for human ones (for instance, with the Trill alien-within-an-alien characters the writers seemed to be trying to confront issues of identity and sex, but they were in over their heads and the attempt, IMO, went nowhere).

The therapy-speak was the most annoying aspect of the new show. No one was allowed to simply be brave or adventurous or even rash -- everything had to be explained away according to whichever article in Psychology Today the episodes' writers had skimmed at the dentist's office. In the old misogynist days of Kirk and Spock, the character of Counselor Troi would have existed to have her complacently perfect psyche overset by a real emotion, usually expressed as a violent attraction to one of the major male crew members. And she usually would have ended up tragically killed (so as to leave the heroes free to go on adventuring), or simply never mentioned again, such as Scotty's lady love in "The Lights of Zetar." But in the later shows that wasn't allowed, and we couldn't get rid of her. (It is interesting that the women who often ended up meeting a bad end were the ones who were what we would have known in my childhood as "tomboys" -- "warrior" type women with "masculine" characteristics such as adventurousness, belligerence, and so on, and a marked lack of "nurturing" characteristics such as a tendency to talk about their and everyone else's emotions and feelings, unless it was feelings like "I'm going to beat up that Romulan!" -- characters such as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, who was played by Denise Crosby.)

Anyway, the two sets of Star Trek series, the original and the new, show how our society's attitudes towards risk, and people who seek risk, have changed, and not for the better. I guess the most obvious explanation for the change is the fact that the generation currently in charge of the arts, the news media, and the educational system -- hint, it was born after a certain war and the initials of its nickname are "BB" -- is growing old and sickly, so everyone has to live through their increasing fears of falling over and not being able to get up just like we had to live through everything else they felt and did. This can't be good, because after growing old there is only one experience left -- the one you don't live through. Then again, at least the grave is silent.

Next day update: hey! I resemble that remark. Actually, I have to admit Udolpho's bashing of scifi fans has an element of truth in it. Back when I was "into" scifi I was as geeky as they come. However, I hope I've cast off most of the "the mundanes don't understand me therefore I am special and better" attitude that too many science fiction afficionados foster in themselves. The fact that you enjoy reading/watching adventure stories where the characters are on other planets doesn't make you more intellectual than people who read spy stories or Harlequin romances.

Udolpho's criticism of science fiction on literary grounds is the basic genre vs. "literary fiction" argument that I've discussed elsewhere. I'm not up to getting into it here -- I'll just say that there is crap in all genres. I won't argue for the literary merits of Dune or any of Heinlein's novels -- for one thing, I haven't read those books for years. To tell you the truth, I don't read much science fiction these days -- the old mainstays that I've got in my bookcases like Andre Norton (who never made a pretense of being anything other than a storyteller), Jack Vance (his writing style is somewhat elevated above mere storytelling, but unlike many writers of modern lit-fic, he doesn't let his prose get in the way), and a few others. Very few new science fiction novels find their way into my home these days. Most of the stories are either rewrites of the same old stuff, more "hard" scifi, or dreary "thought-provoking" socio-political polemics thinly disguised as entertainment. The fantasy genre is in even worse shape. I've actually been trying to catch up on the Canon.

In any case I never seemed to get out of scifi or fantasy what other people seemed to get out of it. For instance, many of my female friends who are still big fans are really into the "power" aspect -- that is, the "magickal" or "psychic" powers the characters, especially female characters, are granted in many fantasy and science fiction novels. I never was really interested in that aspect except insofar as it was necessary to drive the story forward. I think that Andre Norton was one of the few people who (however inconsistently) was able to write about men and women with "powers" without making the idea ludicrous or an obvious deus ex machina. Other science fiction fans are really interested in the idea of societal improvement due to fabulous technological advances/alien contact/offshoot notions from various Social Darwinist fancies. In other words, it's okay to dream about eugenics and "improving the race" if you say it's just fiction.

One complaint against genre fiction is the fact that characters are usually set up to a variety of standard templates, and are in fact simply better-looking, more successful stand-ins for the authors of these stories, or deliberately set up to be blank enough that the reader is able to make the character into a stand-in -- stronger, cleverer, and more heroic -- for himself. This is mostly true (except in the case of a very few works), but that can also be true of literary fiction. Making people is a dangerous business.

Anyway, more later, maybe, in a new post. Right now I want my tea.

I guess it's the meme or something of the week -- now Steve H. is writing about how some people are so averse to risk that even the most ordinary action, one normal people would think nothing about doing -- such as getting in one's own car and driving to another city -- becomes cause for alarms, imaginary fears, and exaggerated warnings.

I know what he means about having those closest to you hold you back and down because of their own psychological problems and lack of initiative. In fact, I had gone far down the road of becoming one of those people myself by the time I broke free of the (mostly imaginary) hold that was on me and left Miami, the city I was born and raised in and had lived in for twice as long as I wanted to. In the space of about a year I had uprooted myself to another city, had my first Relationship™, went back to community college, ended my first (and I decided, only) Relationship™, and moved out on my own to my first real apartment (the squalid efficiency I lived in like a mushroom for nearly ten years in Miami didn't count). And from that time up to now I bought a new car and drove by myself from Orlando, Florida to Lexington, Kentucky to see U2 (this is still the most adventurous thing I have done besides finally leaving Miami -- though I was a grown woman I had never made a trip out of state by myself), graduated from community college with an Associates Degree while supporting myself with student loans and a part-time job, enrolled in university, then quit the part time job, ended up being unemployed longer than I thought and had to leave my apartment and move in with friends for a while, got a new job within the week and another apartment within a couple of months, had my car reposessed (oops!), learned the bus routes from home to work, and stayed alone in my apartment through Hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Jeanne.

Of course, maybe none of that sounds particularly adventurous, but if you could see the little timid, dull creature I used to be you would be amazed. I am slowly returning to the self-sufficiency and -- not fearlessness, but divested of imaginary fears -- self that I was meant to be. And I've been pretty good at avoiding the "you can't do that!" people. Unless it's against the law or physically impossible, of course I can Do That.

I love pictures taken through windows. I don't know why. There's just something about them. And it looks like I'm not the only one who feels that way.

(Via Dave at Garfield Ridge.)

On the other hand, there's risk, and then there's pointless risk. For instance, I don't get the attraction to gambling. It's not that I'm a stiffneck about the "sin" of gambling, it's just that the very idea bores me. I've never wanted to go to Las Vegas, for one thing -- it wasn't until later that I found that there were other things to do in Vegas (still, not too much that I'm interested in) besides go to some casino and give the owners lots of your money. And all those scenes in James Bond movies where he goes into a casino and confronts the villain over the roullette wheel or something? Except for the cute villain-Bond quips, yawn. Here, though, Virginia Postrel does a good job of explaining the attraction of the eponymous Bond Casino Scene to people first reading the novels in postwar Britain. Still, understanding how people felt then gives rise to no urge to feel the same way. This is where I become glad I live in the here and now. Imagine living in such limited circumstances that playing cards in some sleazy, smoke-filled room full of whores, gangsters, and addicts is considered a glamorous night out. Then again, I used to go out with my friends to skanky dives to see punk bands and we all thought we were having such a fun time. Well, we were!

Link to Postrel's site via Eve Tushnet, somewhere on her impossibly copious blog. How do people type so much? And read so much and think so much? I seem to spend most of my life sleeping. Oh -- and: Andrea Dworkin! Andrea Dworkin! Andrea Dworkin! Andrea Dworkin! -- OK, not even a little scorch mark. Maybe my first name has made me immune.

All right all right -- even though I haven't read any of Dworkin's books, I've read quotes from her on various subjects here and there, and many of the things she had to say I liked. I will wait for you to stop coughing and choking. Sorry about your keyboards and monitors. To continue -- Dworkin may have been crazy as a cat in a sack, but she hit the nail on the head lots of times if you ask me. For instance, in this one statement, which I found in one of Florence King's columns, on the whole Clinton-'N'-Monica controversy: "I have a modest proposal. It will probably bring the FBI to my door, but I think that Hillary should shoot Bill and then President Gore should pardon her."

Oh, but read the whole thing.

Please read this about the distressed moans concering the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Sample:

They think that he should have been tried, over and over again, by an "international court" where countless lawyers could spend their careers defending him and he would die of old age before any sentence could be decided. One reason they're upset is that the Iraqi government cut short a gravy train that a lot of "human rights" lawyers were planning to ride for many years.

One more thing and then I must go to bed: all this fuss over the way he was executed -- hanging -- how it is supposedly a "barbaric" way to execute someone and how it made some people "uncomfortable." As if the electric chair or death by firing squad is a prettier way to go! Sometimes I wonder if people really think about what they are saying.

Barely-Related Addenda: here's an old article on British firm that made the ropes that hung murderers and Nazi war criminals.

I just decided to go back to the previous stylesheet. These new styles leave a lot to be desired. Or maybe just my eyes do.

Lots of Blogspot sites, and Google's email program, seem to be having some sort of problem.

Live reporting on the internet by a Blogger!!!

Is it just me, or is the whole little contrived "controversy" about the new Muslim congressman wanting to be sworn in office on a Koran instead of a Bible just so much more manipulative bullshit? Even atheist and agnostic congresspersons (and I'm sure there are a few) think nothing of putting their hands on a Bible for a minute while they rattle off the ceremonial words, but suddenly along comes Keith Ellison (who has a double-helping of specialness in the minds of our race-obsessed media, because he's Of Color™ too!) and suddenly only Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Koran is good enough for this little petty party. (I wonder if anyone's worked in the Sally Heming angle yet. Oh, I'm going to hell...)

You know, normally I am all for tradition these days, but I'd be willing to give up the whole swearing-in-on-a-Bible thing just so nonsense like this can't happen anymore.

Via Kathy Shaidle.

You can't count on anything these days. Blogspot really does seem to have blown a gasket, and since it's a Google service now, Gmail is also cacked up. I was able to open my inbox, but not close it. And it wouldn't finish loading anyway, so I couldn't reply to my emails. I guess I'm going to have to find another fricking webmail program to use. Too bad, Gmail had such promise. As for Blogspot, it had been doing so well.

Update: some sites are coming up now, but it's still slow and wacky. Irritating.

One more update: okay, things seem to be working, at least on the Gmail end of things, for now.

Charlie Rangel's bringin' the sexy back to the Capitol:

January 4, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - Rep. Charles Rangel has evicted Vice President Dick Cheney from his office in the Capitol, and the Harlem heavyweight is moving into the prime digs today, The Post has learned.

They went all Ty Pennington on the joint:

Gilded letters were freshly painted atop the office door yesterday proclaiming "Ways and Means Committee" - confirming that the office now belongs to Rangel, the House panel's new chairman.

And,

Capitol workers expunged the last traces of Cheney and brought in Rangel's plush furniture.

And the hold music will be changed to the theme from Superfly.

(Via it comes in pints?)

I didn't really want to go pale, but some screen resolutions hated the skinny-columned "Vicksburg" stylesheets, and the dark one made my head ache. Also you couldn't really see links. So anyway, it's this one for a while.

In me news -- I confirmed the bed will be delivered tomorrow. Of course I didn't completely clean the room like I planned -- work this week was, of course, extra-heavy on the hectic, and today was particularly wearing. And I've just had it physically, so I decided to open the bottle of Covey Run riesling I bought at Publix. It was a good choice -- I'll be buying that one again.

Anyway, I finally decided that the cat wasn't eating because she didn't like the expensive vet-approved cat food. It's always been this way with any cat I have the care of -- they refuse to eat anything "good" for them, they want the crap cat food. Well, I bought some of her favorite brand name, and she not only showed eagerness to eat for the first time in nearly two weeks, but she chowed it down. So that's that. She still has to take her pill, though -- today she didn't give me too much trouble as I shoved it into her little gullet, probably because she could see the plate of food waiting.

And last but not least, the very needy neighbor lady is going to move in with her daughter. Thank God -- and not just for my own selfish need to be alone, but because she is too frail to live by herself. She keeps falling down, for one thing, and one day she's going to really get hurt. I'm glad her relatives have finally come through. Now I just have to keep her from giving me things. (Already successfully headed off -- the offer of a corner tv stand I don't need, as my tv already has plenty of things to stand on. Actually, I am going to be dragging more than a few furniture pieces of my own to the dumpster soon if I can't give them away.)

Well, that's my exciting life. I am exhausted and will probably go to bed soon. Nite.

There's no place to run...

I accepted this a long time ago but then I'm old enough to remember the Teheran "hostage crisis" -- i.e., the day the fanatical Muslim jihadists declared war on the non-Muslim world:

Iraq is merely a front in wider regional — and indeed, global — war. Iran declared war on the west in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini announced his intention of conquering the west for Islam. The response of the west has been to ignore the fact that war was thus declared upon it, as was demonstrated by attacks upon it ever since by Iran — along with the Sunni/Wahhabi Islamists, who were both its deadly theological rivals for regional hegemony and at the same time its allies in the war against the free world.

Incidentally, the reason so many Americans -- many of whom may know just enough about the differences between various "schools" of Muslim thought to think that they know all they need to know -- refuse to accept the last bit about Sunni/Shi'ite alliances of necessity, is because Americans on the whole tend to stop developing their personality after they graduate high school. Especially liberal types -- usually these are the "sensitive" kids whose treatment at the hands of what they describe as a crass, jock-loving, smart-kid-hating school milieu developed the persecution complexes that they have inflicted upon the rest of us ever since. So when they hear about two groups who apparently hate each other being described as "allies" they can't comprehend it -- would the jocks and the nerds get together at Anywhereville High, USA, for any reason? Shyeah, right.

(Via Instapundit. Title and first sentence from these lyrics.)

I haven't been blogging much lately because I've kind of been preoccupied with things. One of them is the arrival of my new platform bed. It came yesterday, and I finally got a good night's sleep. This is, in fact, the first nice bed I've ever owned -- all the others were those cheap metal regular beds (the kind for box spring/mattress combos), and last, my futon frame, which is several years old and really wasn't for long-time sleep use. So good-bye to this:

And hello to my new best friend:

The thing doesn't move -- no more groaning of springs and wobbliness, no more having to prop the thing up with a plastic file crate so it doesn't fall over (because the middle support for one side of the futon broke and had to be thrown out), etc. So that is the last of the major furniture purchases.

I think that this is pretty much the definitive George-Bush-plastic-turkey wrap-up.

One final note: so I am not the only person on earth who looks askance at the Thanksgiving tradition of serving up lumps of orange-dyed, sweetened library paste, a.k.a. "sweet potatoes." In the South (maybe elsewhere, I don't know) we do them even worse -- think canned "yams" with marshmallows melted all over them, waaarrgghhh! I did, however, find that sweet potato fries, sprinkled liberally with salt, are quite good, as are sweet potato chips.

Natalie Solent, in commenting on an apparent medical scandal in the UK involving a doctor who asked a patient out on a date rather too persistently for someone's comfort, says

we have adopted a stricter code than ever the Victorians knew if for a doctor to ask a patient for a date (not sex, a date) in itself constitutes a career-destroying offence....This all seems designed to force doctors into celibacy; a high proportion of all the people a doctor ever meets must surely be made up of his or her patients.

That doesn't sound so implausible, but it makes me wonder if there isn't something besides exaggerated fears of stalking behind this impulse. Medical care is much more personally obtrusive and invasive than it was in the past; this is an inevitable outcome of our increasingly detailed knowledge of the body and its workings. The more doctors can figure out right down to the molecular level just what is wrong with us, the more intimate is their contact with our bodies. In fact, I don't think I am wrong in saying that a woman has more intimate a relationship with her gynecologist than with her husband -- who, after all, usually neither knows nor cares what her ovaries look like. And men too have to submit to unusually close physical contact with other human beings who are otherwise merely acquaintances, in order to have their medical needs looked after. (For instance, the notorious prostate examination of joke and story.)

I posit that this level of intimate physical contact with other human beings -- more than one these days, and more of them strangers, as the time of the single family doctor is long past -- is the cause of an increasing level of anxiety in society. Another factor that comes into play is the recurrent figure of the doctor-hero -- see all the popular medical-themed television dramas. At some level we know it is wrong to expose ourselves to hero figures the way we must to our own doctors, and this adds to the cognitive dissonance. Our instincts are to keep our clothes on and keep our distance and dignity, but our health needs prevent us from being able to do so.

And another effect of this anxiety is the common depiction in science fiction of medical care as having "advanced" beyond today's "crude" surgical methods -- it's all done with rays from machines that never actually touch you, as in various Star Trek episodes (I especially recall the episode "City on the Edge of Tomorrow" where a delirious Doctor McCoy is running about 1930's Earth moaning about "sutures"). All very nice and clean and no one has to get naked for anyone but Captain Kirk.

I'm still at Natalie Solent's blog -- that links to what I will call the definitive post (because I say so) about all the shocked gasps around the blogosphere at the way some Iraqis at Saddam Hussein's hanging acted. Some of us here in the West seem to forget just how luxurious our lives are, is all I am going to say.

Update: oh, and read this. (Via Libertarian Samizdata.)

OK, weird, but I finally got it working. StyleCatcher needs some fixing if you ask me -- I ended up having to upload the images myself.

Update: oh yeah, and do you think there is any simple explanation of how to use the styles available here? Oh no, you are supposed to somehow know. The so-called "tutorials" I found via Google were worse than useless, as was Sixapart's impossible-to-search "support" forum, and their huge (and now a .pdf file) user manual had no clue. But so what, I overcame the stupidity anyway, go me.

A short observation: what the current conflict boils down to is the fact that Arab culture, which dominates Muslim culture, is for the most part the opposite of Western culture. Until this is both recognized and dealt with we probably aren't going to get anywhere with these people.

Via Kathy Shaidle. Also, see this interesting article: "15 Rules For Understanding the Middle East." The whole Arab culture thing is one reason why Islam holds no attraction for me. More so than other religions it is dominated by a culture whose practices I am already inclined to abhor: oppression of women, prejudice against non-Arabs, slavery is still practiced, the whole "inshallah" thing, lazy men are revered and hard-working ones looked down on, family/tribe over country, a language that sounds like hacking and coughing. The writing is pretty, though.

These people just can't help making total fools of themselves, can they?

That would be Charles Johnson III, the "The most politically incorrect man in the state of Texas." Groovy:

You can tell Charles Johnson when you see him coming down the road in Amarillo. He's the one with the huge stuffed hog riding in the sidecar of his BSA motorcycle.

"I was in Bulgaria and I shot a big 450-pound hog," explained Johnson, 52, an investments business guy who has visited 165 countries around the world. "I had my taxidermist down in Kerrville stuff him with foam rubber. I stuff him in my sidecar and take him barhopping. He probably has a lot more fun dead than alive. We put dollar bills in his hooves for the girls in the strip clubs."

Read on for details on the topless dove hunt next to the prison. (By the way, no, this isn't the same Charles Johnson who runs Little Green Footballs. In case you were wondering.)

(Via Steve H.)

The outdoor cat's appetite has come back, so I was able to get her to ingest her thyroid medicine in a spoonful of her favorite food. I hope this trend holds -- neither of us enjoy the experience of prying her little jaws open and shoving the pill down her throat.

Next hurdle: getting her and my cat to get along, because I get the feeling she's going to be around for a while.

I find it so reassuring when Our Dear Democratic, Progressive, Tolerant, And Did I Mention Democratic? Leaders drop their masks and admit that they think that no woman is fully human unless she has had a man put his seed in her and borne his spawn.

You know, I get sick of hearing about things too. Kathy Shaidle is sick of hearing about Nature Nature Nature (damn, I think, looking at my favorite color combination that I happened to wear today -- oh well, I'm an autumn, so those colors look good on me). I am sick of hearing about the wonders of childbirthing and how we-uns should all get in the stirrups and shoot five or six out for the cause of Fambly, and if we don't we are selfish old shrews who will destroy Western Civilization and the Muslims and their twenty children per wife households will take over the world. Never mind that Western Civ is currently too weak-willed to do what it really takes to save itself* -- it might upset The Chillllldren™! Hey, "Senator" Boxer, and all the rest of you waving your stretched-out-from-all-the-kids love canals in my face as proof of your moral superiority, you know what you can do? You can all suck on my shrivelled-up, dusty, unused spinster twat.

*Hint: large explosive devices, various objects both sharp and blunt, and a complete shutdown of immigration from certain countries as well as complete deportation of certain foreign nationals (the nice and the not-so-nice both -- it's too bad, but haven't you heard we're in a war?), are all involved.

Update: I've never seen all of Rosemary's Baby (Mia Farrow gives me hives) or It Lives! -- though it makes me think of Florence King's parody horror-movie plot: Umbilicus Rex, about a fetus that eats up his father's penis during intercourse. It's true that the idea of growing a new life inside me and all of that held zero appeal for me, but that's because I've never wanted children. Not because I thought they'd break all my things or cause me emotional pain, but because I just never had any interest in family life. I always really did prefer my own company to that of any other person, though I had friends I liked well enough. But when the parents had driven them home I always did feel that bit of relief that I was alone with myself and my books and my notepads full of very bad fantasy stories again. I suppose I had observed that having children meant never getting to be alone, but this was only the occasion for me to be relieved that I didn't want to have any kids. As for romance, the precursor to any child-making activities, I had very little interest in that as well. The Seventies did have something to do with that -- who would want to date any of the smarmy, greasy creeps that men had mostly become in the Me Decade? Not me.

Incidentally, I did watch Mary Tyler Moore and Police Woman, but despite the fact that both shows portrayed single career women, they also showed these women doing the conventional agonizing about their relationships, or lack of them, with men. It was always assumed that one day Mare would get married, quit her job at the station, and have a passel of kids in a nice Minneapolis suburb -- she was that kind of character. Pepper's future was a little harder to place, but maybe that was because Angie Dickinson looked like one of those women who smelled like cigarette smoke no matter how much they bathed and perfumed themselves. I decided that she would quit (or be forced out of) the force when her secret drinking became not-so-secret, and end up either joining AA and getting a PI license (and a new show, more noir than Police Woman), or face down in a ditch somewhere in Los Angeles clutching an empty flask of Gilbey's vodka.

PS: I watched Cat On A Hot Tin Roof all the way to the end and realized that no one ever talked about the real reason Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor's character) was so antsy in the pantsy: she didn't just want to have sex, she wanted to have her husband's children. Her "no-neck monsters!" comment was a slap at her sister-in-law, who had after all had a hand in turning her children into brats. So all this is to say: I don't have anything against children either, it's the parents I can't stand.

I left the following comment at Cronaca's place in regards to this unfortunate fellow's experience:

Note to self: Atlanta may not be such a great place to move to after all. In Orlando (where I now live) it's actually safer to cross in the middle of the street than at the officially-designated crossing places at the intersections. Intersections here are usually a free-for-all, as you are allowed to make right turns against the red light, and drivers tend to keep going until the last possible minute (the "I swear the light was still yellow when I went through it officer" argument), and when the light turns green everyone starts off as if the gun at the Indy 500 had just fired. Then again, maybe they don't drive as if possessed by demons in Atlanta.

I can't count how many times I've been nearly run over at intersections while trying to cross while the "walk" signal was on, and never mind that the crosswalk signals here are all set to go red after about ten nanoseconds. That being said, they do have spasms of ticketting jaywalkers here, but usually they do that in downtown Orlando, one of the few places where you can cross at corners with less of a risk of being run over (in that area there are stricter traffic rules and slower speed limits -- and narrower streets, unlike the network of huge state roads and highways that cross the rest of the Greater Orlando area).

Something I've never heard anyone bring up before has bothered me off and on: since the world is round, won't any direction Muslims pray at be facing Mecca?

Update: no, it's not! See the comments for explanations by people who didn't have to struggle not to fall asleep during Geometry 1.

I haven't had anything to say about a number of blogworld hot items. One such is the Duke "rape" case. Now I will: I guess that there is now an equivalent to that driving-while-black scenario -- call it "partying while white." Because you know, of course, that one touch of the demon liquor (and the sight of a stripper-of-color) turns those wimpy white boys into sex-crazed Viking hordes.

That being said, maybe from now on college partiers will refrain from hiring strippers. It's not "fun" or cute or boys just being boys -- it's sleazy and rather sad, and no, you are not in fact as cool as Otter and Bluto. While injustice has definitely been done (especially to the one accused who wasn't even there), I can't help thinking that if drunken revelry hadn't become a necessary part of college life in the minds of Americans this wouldn't have happened.

I want one:

A GIANT owl that devours foxes and small deer is terrorising shoppers and drinkers in a town centre.

Experts say the bird is capable of killing a fox or small deer and warn pet owners to watch their animals.

(Via Tim Blair & Harry Hutton.)

Cicero: “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child."

Once upon a time it was discovered that the history we were all taught was full of slanted viewpoints and doctored myths that had been complacently accepted by earlier generations, and that this would no longer do, so a proclamation went out across the land: uncover the truth about the past and teach our children to look unflinchingly upon the bad as well as happily upon the good of what our forefathers did so that we could forge a better culture as free as possible from lies and cant.

Then along came a Bad Fairy, who envied the truth-seekers their academic reputations and as well all those nice, fat research grants. The Bad Fairy's problem was that she didn't have the patience or frankly the talent (she was a bad fairy in more ways than one) to work to obtain a good reputation as well as all the sweet, sweet cash. So she figured out a way to get these things anyway: she put a spell upon the land that made everyone exchange their own clear native tongues for politically-correct speech, a language where every word offends everyone else in a different way. Soon all the people had done so many horrible things in the name of Political Correctness that it was obvious that they had outdone their ancestors in narrowness and idiocy. The only way to avoid having to confront this truth about themselves was to pretend the past never happened. And so history was once more taught as it had been in the bad old days: as a compendium of slanted viewpoints and doctored myths.

(Via Tom McMahon.)

People who stand in apartment courtyards just letting their fucking Nextels chirp and chirp and fucking chirp must be destroyed. Excuse me.

The discussion has gotten too long at Ace of Spades HQ for me to get my pearls of wisdom noticed, so I guess I'm going to have to post on the great hullaballoo over Dinesh D'Souza's apparent claim, in his new book, that American decadent liberal types are to blame for Muslim hatred of the West. Well, it's true that you won't find very many fanatical Muslims lining up to buy the latest Woody Allen vehicle on dvd. And it's true that much of what comes out of Hollywood and academia is decadent tripe. I've said so about a zillion times. But if D'Souza really is making such a simplistic claim, then I've got to go with the libertarians and libertines over at Ace's place. For he will be forgetting one important thing: they don't like conservative, sexually restrained Westerners either. They don't like anyone who isn't Muslim. We could burn Hollywood to the ground, ban all books that aren't about God 'n' family, and make all the women here dress like the women on the Lawrence Welk Show, and they still would hate us. Because we would still not be part of the Muslim Collective Organism. And even if we did convert, it still wouldn't all be universal love and hugs.

(If you are not really interested in the saga of me and a cat you'll want to skip this post.)

Well, today I did it: I finally brought the old cat I've been taking care of inside the apartment. She'd been an outdoor cat, then she got sick. I took her to the vet and got her medicine, but she'll have to take it the rest of her life (which as she has gotten better may be longer than we all thought), and it's not really easy to give an outdoor cat a pill at regular times every day. For the past couple of weeks the old neighbor lady who just fell in love with the cat has been keeping her inside, but as she (the old lady) is feeble and tottery and really can't handle a pet at her stage of health, and as she is also moving in with her family in Ft. Lauderdale in a month, and as they have two dogs, this wasn't going to be a permanent state of affairs.

I was planning on finding some kind of home for the cat because she is rather sweet (usually -- details coming up) and I may still post some signs at vet's offices and such, but I am not holding out much hope that there is anyone who wants to take on an aging cat with a busted thyroid who needs to take a pill every day for the rest of her life. And I was worried also about her getting into it with other cats (two have showed up recently in her "territory" of my patio and the surrounding area, and they both look young and feisty -- and they both belong to people because one I've seen lounging in the same place on the other side of my building, and the other one has a red collar). And I was worried about hawks and owls, which are plentiful in this area. And so on.

So I decided that if I'm going to be buying medicine for her every month I might as will take her in. There's only one problem: I already have a cat. Xena (my main cat) has actually been fairly well-behaved about her new roommate -- usually she's the one making the banshee noises. Maybe it's because the shoe is on the other foot -- before she was the interloper, now she's the one with the territory that's been invaded. And the invader has switched her former sweet personality to a Growling and Hissing Demon personality. O.C. (whose actual name is "Squeaks" or "Squeaky" because her normal meow sounds like a rusty door hinge) does not want to be in this house with it's Strange Other Cat smell, and she's been pissing and moaning all night.

Xena was giving me martyred looks, so I finally moved her food and water bowls into the bedroom and moved the litter box to a place where she won't have to cross the apartment and go past the Alien Growling Beast to pee. (I also hope the Alien Growling Beast figures out that the big purple Booda Dome is where the pee and poop go.) From my experience and that of others I can expect about two or three more weeks of this.

Anyway, that's the Tale of Two Kitties, Chapter One.

I have decided to use my day off to do some much-needed housework so depending upon how dedicated I am to doing this you may either see no posts until later or one every fifteen minutes. I just may also walk over to the store and pick up the ingredients for Bat Masterson's hot dogs. I am not usually into hot dogs but that recipe does look like it will be good.

Feline dispatch: Xena is dozing on the bed. Squeaks (or Growls, as I should probably call her) is sleeping under a chair in the living room. The war has paused for naps!

Hotdog update, a few hours later: yes, they were good.

Cat update: all quiet on the Western Front.

Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions... Anyway, I decided to separate them more, so I fixed up a temporary litter box for the new cat, and moved Xena (my first cat -- this is getting confusing) into the bedroom. She was none too pleased, but I used to close her out of the bedroom when I wasn't home, and she didn't like that either, and she is always trying to get into the closet, because I keep that door closed too. She just doesn't like any rooms in her domain to be inaccessible to her. I don't know what she thinks I'm keeping in the closet -- all the really cool toys and good food? Every time I open the closet door she runs in there and starts sniffing around suspiciously.

Anyway, once I separated the cats I could feel the tension go out of the room. The older cat is much more relaxed. (Of course, just now my cat ran out of the bedroom when I opened the door and they did the street cat face off. But this is important: first they just sort of looked at each other and exchanged ambiguous meows, so it wasn't the immediate glaring and growling this time. Progress!)

I'm sure most of my readers who prefer dogs or are otherwise indifferent to this furry domestic drama have collapsed in comas across their keyboards so I'll finish up here. Work was incredibly hectic, as if everyone finally got back from all their vacations and realized they had jobs and had to catch up with everything today! right now! so I am ready to collapse myself. Therefore I have nothing profound or witty to say about anything -- in fact, I barely have the ability to put two words together that make sense. This started about 3pm: by the end of the workday I was answering my boss with "huh?" and telling clients that I couldn't remember how to use the software I'm supposed to help them with either.

Blogspot gets another well-earned kick in the nads: Kathy Shaidle has moved her blog to a new platform. (Here's the final post on her old site. Ouch! I guess newer isn't always better...)

I've never watched 24 and I probably never will, but I've always liked Kiefer Sutherland.

Maybe I'll put in my Netflix queue that movie I saw years ago, the one where Kiefer plays an uptight FBI guy who has to hide out with his hippie parents on their commune, or something. That's all I remember: Kiefer wearing a suit and angsting, then he's wandering around in a dashiki or whatever, and then there's some kind of chase scene where he gets the bad guy. I used to watch a lot of movies...

(Via Treacher on Blowing Smoke.)

Kim du Toit reads the news. And now the news won't come out from under the bed. Anybody got any pepper spray?

I have just one thing to say to the revival (or continuance -- this is an old canard going back to before the Cold War) of the idea that the desire to fight the current crop of totalitarians' attempt to take over the world, which is dumped under the convenient heading "being conservative," is based on "fear": just go up to one of these "fearless" and "open-minded" liberal/progressives who are so sure that "incidents" like the World Trade Center attack are nothing to worry about and that Islamic jihadist terrorists would only be our fwiends if we could figure out the right way to hug them, and whisper this in their ear:

"global warming."

Then sit back and enjoy a few hours of that old-time "OMG we're all gonna die!" gospel.

(Title source.)

Update: I rest my case.

Second update: url to the post on Kesher Talk changed.

Third update: and changed back. What the hell? I did have it right the first time!

Okay, this is the last thing I'll add to this post I promise update: oh my God! Here it comes!

Remember when it was the hippy yippie radical contingent that had all the cool, snarky posters, buttons, and t-shirts?

Dennis Miller on the global warming hysteria:

When did nature get so whiney? We're not allowed to do anything to nature anymore, except look at it. It's like porn with leaves. And where's this delicate balance I always hear so much about? Every time I watch "Animal Planet," I see a rabid harp seal popping penguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube.

(Bolds mine.) I love the internet because people always find stuff like this so I don't actually have to watch shows like Hannity & Colmes.

I'm beginning to wonder if Jimmy Carter converted secretly to Islam or something. Not recently -- back when or even before he was president. There could have been more behind our limp response to the Iran hostage "crisis" than Vietnam War weariness, reluctance to disturb the Soviets, and fear of irritating the oil-rich Muslim world. Sure, those were important factors, but then-President Jimmah's response was more supine than circumstances called for. And then there are his subsequent antics.

(Via.)

Update: maybe he's just horrible. (Via.)

Update: no one told me I wrote "subsequence" when I meant to write "subsequent." Guys, you're supposed to keep track of these things!

Slightly related to this in a weird way: "Daucus Karota" was the name of a band formed by Rozz Williams, the former lead singer of the punk/goth band Christian Death.

Oh good, Tex is back posting and is as evil as ever. He's moved, an experience I will be having later this year, and he's got a cat. Bwah, he's been assimilated!

Back to my part of the world. Speaking of moving, yesterday I went on an expedition. As some of you may remember from me mentioning it here or on last year's blog before, I am looking to move to an apartment more convenient to my job -- in other words, either within walking distance or at least not so far by bus as it is now. True, I am getting rides from coworkers most of the time but I can't always rely on that -- they aren't my chauffeurs, and have their own lives. I will get back to driving someday, but circumstances and my own inertia are pushing that "someday" farther and farther into the future.

So I have a list of apartment complexes narrowed down to those in my price range and closeness to the job. One in particular caught my eye in that it looked both affordable and within walking distance. (There are other apartment complexes even closer, but they come under the heading "luxury" and are therefore not within my price range.) Yesterday I took the bus to the neighborhood of my office, and from there I walked along the route I'd mapped out. Sure enough, it was in a reasonable walking distance -- about a half-hour's walk would get me to and from work. The neighborhood itself is just past the boundary of all the new luxe condos and so on surrounding my office, and is somewhat seedy, but not too bad. It's like my life, just over the border of respectability. The apartment grounds themselves looked well-maintained and kept up, and the girl at the office (the doors were wide open, probably to take advantage of the gorgeous weather that day, and also were a reassuring indication that home-invasion-type robberies and other thuggery aren't much of a problem in that area -- always something I have to be careful for considering how much I am willing to spend on rent) was pleasant. They didn't have anything coming up until March or April, but my lease isn't up until September anyway so I didn't mind. I went ahead and put myself on a waiting list.

So that was my exciting life. Today I've been sitting around with cramps and so on, just resting, something I haven't done in ages it seems. The weather is warmer than yesterday but still nice, and things are comatose around here for a change. (There were kids playing outside but for a change they weren't screaming their heads off.) The cats are peaceful -- there was one session of staring and hissing, and then the older cat just sort of shrugged and turned her back in an "I'm too old for this shit" way. I basically posted this to let everyone know I am still alive. Nothing is getting my goat today, not even reading about smug bastards who in order to protect their beloved "environment" want to make it even harder for people to get around. They seem to want to turn the entire planet into some sort of untouchable botanical garden, and as well seem to think the human race can feed itself on what each family can grow in a box on the windowsill. Of course people lap this stuff up like soda; it's fast-food thinking.

Hi folks! I'm home here with cramps and a headache and things so you need to entertain me. Start posting entertaining stuff on your blogs, please! Or I will write some more about my cats.

Kathy Shaidle thinks Dinesh D'Souza may be "on to something" when he criticizes Western liberal culture for being decadent and therefore being the cause of Muslim hatred of the West. She focuses on the decadent-liberal-culture part, and I have no quarrel with that, having fulminated against the Slutting of the West in my blogs for some time now. But I think she's wrong this time about why "conservative bloggers" (many of whom can better be described as "economically and socially libertarian non-pacifist bloggers") are so angry at D'Souza. I don't read a whole lot of blogs these days, so I may have missed the "conservatives" fuming at D'Souza for trashing Hollywood. Most of the blogs I've read are pissed off not because D'Souza is such a priss and is frowning at their fun boobies-'n'-beer lifestyle, but because (apparently -- I haven't read the book and am depending upon reviews, of course a biased source) he claims that all we have to do is put our clothes back on and go back to church and the fanatical jihadists will leave us alone.

See, I find this unlikely to have much of an effect, to say the least. Muslims, as has been repeated ad nauseum everywhere, had no trouble attacking pious Christian and Jewish communities back in the day, and the sight of Orthodox Jews -- whose lifestyles are barely distinguishable from the average devout Muslim, except for the number of wives per male -- davening at the Wailing Wall isn't known for causing warm approval in Muslim hearts. Middle Eastern Christians are possibly more overtly devout than Western ones, but they don't seem to get a special pass when Muslim terrorists are in a killing mood.

And so on. I do agree that the people who want to thrust our freewheeling, barely clothed way of partying on a world that isn't interested in it is a mistake; for example, all those "and now all the women will wear bikinis instead of burkhas" celebratory declamations on blogs after we took down the Taliban just made me cringe in embarrassment. On a side note, fascinating as it was, I didn't approve of the way National Geographic hunted down that woman whose adolescent photograph had appeared on their magazine years ago. Yes, I was relieved to learn she was still alive and as safe as anyone living in Afghanistan could be. But it was the occasion for too many of my fellow citizens to cry over her -- look, she's so work-worn! She has to wear a burka! Why is she so old-fashioned? (She spoke favorably of the restrictive rules that governed her life -- people in the West can't understand how such rules can be safeguards in a culture like hers.) And so on... all of which ended up sounding very patronizing.

And so on. But D'Souza's mistake comes down to ignoratio elenchi -- "irrelevant conclusion." Yes, Western culture has become decadent, flabby, and definitely in need of a severe overhaul. No, doing so won't stop Muslim fanatics from wanting to convert, subjugate, or kill the infidels everywhere. Cleaning ourselves up will benefit us spiritually and morally, but we'll still have the enemy to contend with. By the way, it is useful to note that apparently being a Muslim doesn't mean you don't get to have all sorts of decadent fun, as long as you don't get caught.

The reason I can't bring myself to get excited about the so-called "coming demographic collapse of the West" is because the rhetoric has started to sound like that old time racist bullshit. Some of the commenters in the linked thread sound like the troglodytes at a KKK Klavern ranting about how the "darkies" are going to run riot. I want nothing to do with this crap, and anyone who believes that Western Culture (aka "rule of law") = Whites Only deserves to be the only pale person in town. This may lose me some readers. Don't care. Don't let the cyber door smack you in the sunburn.

(Kathy Shaidle is right: ad hominem arguments are more fun. I can't find the post where she said that on her new blog. I can't find her email either -- so I can't tell her that her web page is now blocked by Websense under the category "Sex" so I can't read her site from work. Not that I have any time any more, now that they've decided we have to change everything we are doing and by the way why haven't we already done so even though no memos were sent out and nothing was told to anyone who actually had to do all this shit?)

As you have probably figured out by now, I don't have much of a maternal instinct. You might as well also know that the "starving African waif" story has very little power to tug at my heartstrings (probably because they are made of well-cured rawhide). And last but not least, I am not inclined to be soft on crime.

All that being said, these are my kind of starving African waifs turned thieves:

Dozens of street children have invaded a five-star hotel food tent and feasted on meals meant for sale at the World Social Forum in Kenya's capital.

The hungry urchins were joined by other participants who complained that the food was too expensive at the annual anti-capitalist get together.

(.....)

The children, who had been begging for food, launched the raid after being told they would have to pay for the food.

(Bolds mine.) What else is there to say? Except that they certainly showed the organizers of this event what being "anti-capitalist" actually means.

(Via Digital Brownshirt, further via Ace of Spades.)

You can invite me, James! (I think I have a Myspace page somewhere. Do I? Now I'm not sure.)

Unexpected: Philip K. Dick and Peter De Vries? Who knew!

John Kerry seems a little jealous of all the attention Jimmy "Dhimmi" Carter has been getting, so he's decided to upstage the senile old coot and openly suck up to one of our enemies in front of God and everybody. Oh, and that "left hand" of Khamenei's is so a fake -- the real one is shoved up Kerry's ass, the better to manipulate the Lurch-like senator in fine puppetmaster style. I supposed I'd better start looking up burqa patterns on the internet.

(Via Ace of Spades, who seems uncharacteristically to have been failed by words. The antics of Our Betters on the left have that effect on a lot of people.)

I came upon this dismaying comment on one of Steve H.'s posts, on the subject of penis piercing:

"Do not be so quick to dismiss the pierced-penis brigade...I know of at least one (hetero) Naval officer with that particular addition to his body."

Jesus Jumping H. Christ on a pogo stick. Anyone in the military who pierces his penis or does any of the other decadent body modifications currently in style should be given a dishonorable discharge. I don't care how brave they were previously -- doing something so stupid (shoving a ring through your genitalia is stupid, do I have to list the reasons why) indicates a serious problem with their ability to resist the pleasures of the moment, which can lead to breaches of discipline which the military can ill afford.

And did I say "decadent"? I meant it. People don't get their peepees mutilated for looks -- it's not like we go about with our pudenda as exposed as our ears. (Yet.) They do it because it's supposed to enhance sexual pleasure. Apparently being part of a generation whose sex drive is turned up to eleven isn't enough. I really don't know how anything gets done these days. No wonder so many people on tv look haggard and exhausted.

I might -- just might -- give tattoos a pass, since they are "traditional," at least for members of the armed services. (And only certain kinds of tattoos on certain locations -- butterflies and "tribal symbols" across the ass aren't part of this tradition.) But the rest is nothing but rebellious faddishness indulged in by the spoiled, arrogant youth of the West. Military training is supposed to cure that sort of thing.

What I Learned From 9-11 Conspiracy Theories. No time to say more! Via Kathy Shaidle.

You know, it only takes a second to look things up on the internet.

Hey, kids! Did you read the web page I linked to this morning and exclaim "That man is so deluded! How can he deny the truth!" Are you worried about Rethuglikkkan Theocrats blasting you with Jesus rays? Did you find yourself humming along to an Air Supply song on the radio the other day? Well, head on down the the grocery store and get yourself a box of Reynolds Wrap! Hurry! There's no time to lose -- I can hear the black helicopters! Oh no, there they a

(Via commenter paco on Tim Blair's site.)