New Orleans ‘mourners’ bid adieu to Katrina – Yahoo! News
A few denizens of the renascent Crescent City held a traditional funeral parade for that old beey*$!0tch, Katrina. That’s how you respond, everyone: grace AND HUMOR under pressure.
Miss Alli has posted the recap for Amazing Race Season 8 Episode 3″ href=”http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=76&story=8374&limit=&sort=”>last’s week’s installment in what used to be an exciting and innovative reality show that challenged people to do things they never thought possible, in exotic locales around the world.
Now, of course, it’s a show about dipshit college boys making fart jokes at Space Camp, and it’s about annoying people becoming more annoying than anyone thought possible.
It’s all acutely not fascinating, and now with 4 non-elimination legs yet to go, the agony will be even more prolonged.
Yes, I’ll continue to watch the show, because somehow I keep hoping that it will suck less. At some point fairly soon, they’re supposed to actually leave the country, and I’d like to see how the families with kids or teens react to that.
I can’t wait to see how the shrieking Weaver clan reacts to non-USians, and especially to heathen temples. But first, we have to get through tomorrow night’s episode, which will conjure up tragic memories for the Weavers. I may not like them, but I think scheduling a task at a venue similar to the one where the paterfamilias died is dirty pool.
By the way, it just makes me laugh every time I see “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” and Everett uses the term correctly. Words is funny.
Researcher Takes Aim at Alien Abductions – Yahoo! News
Take a look at the story above. It’s an interesting story, but the really noteworthy thing is the web advertisement for Bausch and Lomb Soflens Multi-Focal contact lenses. It’s hard to ignore, because the tagline keeps changing – one line is “Read your news. Without reading glasses.”. At least it’s in soothing colors and doesn’t cycle too fast, so it’s relatively easy to ignore.
But here’s the really annoying part. When you roll your mouse pointer over the advertisement, the clear image is replaced with a much larger image that covers the first few paragraphs of the news story, so that it appears to be completely blurred. The ad part stays in sharp focus, but there’s a “magnifying glass” you can click on to read the ad copy in the blurred-out portion. It’s still really hard to read, but at least you can get the gist. Which is, of course, that the product will benefit those of us who probably should be wearing bi-focal glasses by now, but who’ve been getting along by moving our glasses up and down the bridges of our noses, or by wearing contact lenses with one strength in one eye, and a different strength in the other eye.
Show of hands? It’s not just me, I know.
The really annoying thing is that I’d probably be interested in this product come January, when it’s time to replace my specs and/or contacts.
Apparently American Girl isn’t squeaky clean enough for some conservative groups, because of their support for a respected girls-advocacy group.
Chicago Tribune | Groups Threaten to Boycott American Girl
NEW YORK — American Girl, manufacturer of a highly popular line of dolls and children’s books, has become the target of conservative activists threatening a boycott unless the toy maker cuts off contributions to a youth organization that supports abortion rights and acceptance of lesbians.
The protest is directed at an ongoing American Girl campaign in which proceeds from sales of a special “I Can” wristband help support educational and empowerment programs of Girls Inc., a national nonprofit organization which describes its mission as “inspiring girls to be strong, smart and bold.”
American Girl, whose often patriotic products have long had a loyal following among conservatives, issued a statement Friday defending its support of Girls Inc. and assailing the protest campaign.
The group in question is Girls Inc., and the links to advocacy groups that raised the ire of the pro-life, anti-girl groups :eyeroll: are here.
This boycott will mean little or nothing to family members of mine who are big American Girl fans – personally, I can’t really see the appeal, although I’ve read and enjoyed some of the books. I don’t “get” the American Girl love, where little girls and their moms make pilgrimages to American Girl Place to have lunch, watch a show, and buy dolls and matching outfits for themselves.
However, I totally “get” the need for a girls’ advocacy group to help young women deal with issues of their own sexuality and health. Because if we don’t help them deal with it, untold lives will be ruined, and untold children will be raised in an unending cycle of poverty. That’s where the pro-life factions fail to “get” it; they do everything to protect the philosophical concept of “life,” but they do nothing to protect young womens’ lives, or the lives of their children. Once they’re born, not their problem, apparently.
I ran across another essay today written by a Catholic nun, Joan Chittister. It reminded me of the story and I wondered if anything further was known, beyond the Newsweek followup a couple of months later.
The original photos were taken by Chris Hondos. He has some other news stories about the Hassan family here.
Remember her and her siblings. The soldiers were cleared of wrongdoing, but after they come home, will they remember, or try to forget? I don’t know – but these images should not be forgotten, ever.
AAWWWWwwwww! Ooowwowoooooga! Woochie woochie coochie! Gooo! Cyoooooot! Wookada baybee! Seeda baybee! Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
Gah. Gah. Gah. Gah. Gah.
I heard this exchange on NPR this morning and looked around for a transcript. Found it at AAR:
WH aide: “Capt. Kennedy are you ready?”
Kennedy: “I am ready, ma’am.”
WH aide: “Okay, this is for the money. We are going to time this and remember that if the President cut’s it short, if he asks more questions, if you have the microphone and he follows up with a question to you, no matter who has it, Captain Pratt if you have the microphone and the President hears something and he wants more information, you just keep that microphone and talk to the President.”
Kennedy: “Okay.”
WH aide: “But if he gives us a question that is not something that we have scripted Captain Kennedy you are going to have the mic and that’s your chance to impress us all.”
Kennedy: “Okay.”
WH aide: “Which won’t be a problem for you.”
Chalk up another misstep in recent days for this administration, and another little prevarication on the part of the White House press secretary.
That’s all Gene Robinson wants to be known for being: the good bishop, and not just the gay bishop.
According to the article, the Diocese of New Hampshire is doing very well, with most parishes reporting modest growth, especially from young families. And there’s been a surge of applications for clergy positions in the diocese. Most are not gay, but think New Hampshire is the place for them to begin their journey.
My current struggles with air quality at my work have reminded me of something from nearly 20 years ago – the “Symptomatic Nerve Gas” guy. This was a street character that I used to see out and about when I was still living in Eugene. I moved from there in 1985, but still remember running into the guy when my friend Jean and I would go to clubs for live music and dancing. We’d spot him and start chanting “symptomatic nerve gas” to each other, because that’s all we ever heard him say.
I was astounded just now after Googling around a little to find that Mr. SNG is now a character in a book by Jack Cady:
FIVE OF US ARE REGULARS HERE. Allow me to introduce the cast. Although years come and go, and so do people, our community is fairly stable.
Our newest member is Symptomatic Nerve Gas, who takes his time a-dying from something gnawing on his liver. He is with us these past two years. Symptomatic Nerve Gas is florid and purpled and beefy. He is in his late fifties. A horror from earlier life lies athwart his brain. In Korea he saw death dealt on a scale larger than any seen by Genghis Khan. Although he sometimes speaks of other things to us, his only public words are “Symptomatic Nerve Gas” and “Felony Assault.” His Army pension sustains him. He strides forth each day with field pack rolled. He wears pressed pants, denim shirts fresh from the laundry; a man of military cleanliness. He stands on street corners repeating his two phrases in a command voice. People are first shocked into avoidance. Then, familiarity brings scorn, Symptomatic Nerve Gas has an important message, but no stage presence. He breaks no laws. People mistake him for a nut.
Wow.
The only thing I’d add to that description is that he always carried a big green duffel, stuffed full. And on the back of the duffel, written with a magic marker in large capitals, it said “SYMPTOMATIC NERVE GAS.”
I’m not sure, but I think he may have been around Seattle, too… as this poem would seem to suggest. And according to this, he used to stand on street corners near the University of Washington, chanting his mantra. Somebody from Fark spotted him there, too, so it must be so. Sadly, he apparently died in 1990.
Requiescat in pacem.
And as for Seattle itself, it seems that a lot of my favorite places are gone, too. This makes me very sad. Especially as on a whim I decided to wear my old “Queen Anne Coffee House” T-shirt, since we’re in the midst of the baseball playoffs and this was the “uniform” for the D- or E- or XYZ-league softball team I played on in about 1993.
Don’t let the bright colors and screaming banner ads put you off, this is going to turn out to be important in the tale of how the WHIG party orchestrated the war in Iraq.
First, you form a sekrit club and have meetings about stuff you want to get done, like knock off countries you don’t like because they’re not American enough and have a lot of oil that you might like to have. Then you give a journalist a really, really juicy scoop that paints that country as teh evil. Then you use that published story to justify why you have to invade teh evil country. Then you discredit everyone that objects to the war with teh evil country and even “out” their family members who work for sekrit gummint groups and whose identities are supposed to remain sekrit by law. You do this sekritly, of course, because hello? Against the law to “out” them, even in a good dirty tricks kind of cause. Then word leaks out about your little dirty tricks campaign, via a couple of journalists, including your pet one. Then you let the original journalist, that you previously used for your own purposes, go to jail for a while because her journalistic principles won’t allow her to out a source for the dirty tricks.
Although really, she probably was hoping that if she showed her loyalty by going to jail, she’d get some more juicy scoops.
Too bad the first “juicy scoop” turned out to be a total fabrication, but it sold a lot of papers in its day, and it got Colin Powell to say things he and his staff otherwise wouldn’t have had him say in his big scary speech to the UN. You know, the one that really got the ball rolling on the war against teh evil country and its “alleged” weapons of mass destruction.
And by the way – “WHIG?” I know it stands for “White House Iraq Group” but at first I thought it was a resurgence of a precursor to the Republican Party.
The group relied heavily on New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who, after meeting with several of the organization’s members in August 2002, wrote an explosive story that many critics of the war believe laid the groundwork for military action against Iraq.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, Miller wrote a story for the Times quoting anonymous officials who said aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as centrifuges. Her report said the “diameter, thickness and other technical specifications” of the tubes — precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts — showed that they were “intended as components of centrifuges.”
She closed her piece by quoting then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice who said the United States would not sit by and wait to find a smoking gun to prove its case, possibly in the form of a “a mushroom cloud.” After Miller’s piece was published, administration officials pursued their case on Sunday talk shows using Miller’s piece as evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear bomb, even though those officials were the ones who supplied Miller with the story and were quoted anonymously.
Rice’s comments on CNN’s “Late Edition†reaffirmed Miller’s story. Rice said that Saddam Hussein was “actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” and that the tubes — described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as “dual-use” items — were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”
Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also mentioned the aluminum tubes story in the Times and said “increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target” of an Iraqi atomic bomb. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” asked viewers to “imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction.â€
President Bush reiterated the image of Rice’s mushroom cloud comment in his Oct. 7, 2002 speech.
The International Atomic Energy Agency later revealed that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were never designed to enrich uranium.
In February of 2003, WHIG allegedly scripted the speech Powell made to the United Nations presenting the United States’ case for war.
Powell’s speech to the UN, United Press International reported, “was handled by the White House Iraq Group, which… provided Powell with a script for his speech, using information developed by Feith’s group. Much of it was unsourced material fed to newspapers by the OSP. Realizing this, Powell’s team turned to the now-discredited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. But some of Feith’s handiwork ended up in Powell’s mouth anyway.