One of the things I like best about blogging is that people from all over the world have access to what, if anything, I'm thinking. Most of the visitors to this site are from North America, followed by Europe, Oceania, Asia, South America, and rarely Africa. As you can see from the map, we have had visits from every continent, except Antarctica.
Ortiz hit a grounder that second baseman Josh Barfield ran down in short right-center. With no chance to get Ortiz, Barfield held the ball but alertly threw home then Crisp decided to break for the plate.
Martinez scooped Barfield's throw on the right side, and shifted his body across the plate, shielding Crisp from sliding under the tag to preserve Cleveland's precarious lead.
"Coco had a chance and in this type of game you take it," Francona said. "Victor did a great job of blocking the plate. If the throw's just a little off there, Coco scores." Yahoo Sports
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.As always you should read the whole thing if you haven't done so already.
If you are unfamiliar with Al Terzi, believe me when I say the resemblance is uncanny.Reason: Environmental activists often oppose road building. They say such roads will lead to the destruction of the rain forests or other wildernesses. What would you say to them?
Borlaug: These extremists who are living in great affluence...are saying that poor people shouldn't have roads. I would like to see them not just go out in the bush backpacking for a week but be forced to spend the rest of their lives out there and have their children raised out there. Let's see whether they'd have the same point of view then.
I should point out that I was originally trained as a forester. I worked for the U.S. Forest service, and during one of my assignments I was reputed to be the most isolated member of the Forest Service, back in the middle fork of the Salmon River, the biggest primitive area in the southern 48 states. I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.
Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn't sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.
LONDON - Borders is removing "Tintin in the Congo" from the children's section of its British stores, after a customer complained the comic work was racist, the company said Thursday. David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.
In it, Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi depicts the white hero's adventures in the Congo against the backdrop of an idiotic, chimpanzee-like native population that eventually comes to worship Tintin — and his dog — as gods.
Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unexpurgated edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context.
Enright, who said he first complained to Borders and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality about a month ago, argued such a warning was not enough. "Whether it's got a piece of flimsy paper around it or not, it's irrelevant, it's in the children's section," he said, adding that he felt the book should be treated like pornography or
anti-Semitic literature and not displayed in mainstream bookstores at all.
I'm sure being in any prison sucks. But name me another prison in the history of warfare where the POWs come out fatter than when they went in. Ask any Euro Weenie where they would rather be imprisoned, modern Gitmo or one of the many allied POW camps run by the "neutral" Swiss during WWII. Of course being Euro Weenies they would opt for the Swiss hospitality and like with everything else, they would be wrong.
Hat tip: Ken Herman
...One of the reasons Armies were invented, with their uniforms, insignia and badges; with their elaborate rituals and insistence on discipline is not, as some have ignorantly argued, to gratify some fantasy to play out a boy's adventure story. This machinery was created from the necessity to keep armed young men, recruited from all walks of life, often far from direct supervision, inured to violence and frequently stressed beyond normal endurance from going off the deep end. Yon's story reminds me of one I have frequently told. I met a veteran of the Second World War who told me that he entered the Bayview Hotel on TM Kalaw Street in Manila just after the US Army had driven the Japanese from it. This hotel was about three hundred yards from the location of the current US Embassy. And in it, the Filipino veteran found the walls smeared with the jelly of hundreds of human eyeballs. As a child my uncles had told me about how the Japanese, in the last extremity of despair had kidnapped thousands of young women and gang-raped them before killing them horribly. What the veteran described was one of the places it had happened, at the Bayview Hotel...
I had no doubts whatsoever about the Bayview Hotel story. And even though I don't know for a fact whether the al-Qaeda baked an 11 year old boy and served the carcass to his family, I have no doubt that it could happen. If the Japanese can do it, the Arab can. There but for discipline, culture and force of habit can go anyone at all...
Usually I can find ways to avoid Mac users in my day to day life. Not anymore. Soon, everybody who owns a cellphone is going to be a Mac user, thanks to Apple's latest "innovation", the iPhone. And just like its portable audio predecessor, the iPod, I predict that people will be rendered incapable of referring to the device in generic terms. I promise you, I'm going to fly-kick the first person who tells me they're going to whip out their iPhone and give me an iCall.
Okay, so you buy this magical new appliance with which you are going to run your entire life, communicate with others, communicate on the Intarweb, listen to music, live by the built-in calendar/scheduler… ...until the batteries run down.
Speaking through an American interpreter, Lieutenant David Wallach who is a native Arabic speaker, the Iraqi official related how al Qaeda united these gangs who then became absorbed into “al Qaeda.” They recruited boys born during the years 1991, 92 and 93 who were each given weapons, including pistols, a bicycle and a phone (with phone cards paid) and a salary of $100 per month, all courtesy of al Qaeda. These boys were used for kidnapping, torturing and murdering people.
At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The mother of a US man whose 2006 execution took 86 minutes and involved sticking needles into him 19 times has sued the prison team which oversaw the execution for civil rights violations.
On Monday Irma Clark filed suit in the Cincinnati, Ohio, district court, alleging her son Joseph Clark was exposed to "excessive suffering" violating the US constitution when he was put to death on May 2, 2006, at a state prison in Lucasville, Ohio,
according to court documents.
