If you have any interest in wolves, and let's face it, who doesn't? You should make it a point to watch Nature's In The Valley Of The Wolves on PBS.
One of the most fascinating sequences, at least for me, was when a new pack of wolves took over the valley and began to let the other animals there know that there was a new boss in town. The first victim was a male coyote who had the temerity to try to snack at one of the wolf pack's carcass'. The old wolf pack would have just chased him off, the new wolf pack chased him down and ripped him to pieces. Don't let anyone tell you that war is a man made invention, this was the purest act of war I have ever seen. Von Clausewitz would have been proud.
Thanks and Praise: I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome.
A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from "Chosen" Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.
The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. "Thank you, thank you," the people were saying. One man said, "Thank you for peace." Another man, a Muslim, said "All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother." The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.
Cormac McCarthy and the Coens? The only thing better would be if Sam Peckinpah directed Blood Meridian, but since he died in 1984 this will more than do.
At the third opening, these words:
“Work is love made visible.”
To which I reply, You must have been pretty lucky in your job,
If you ever actually had a job,
But then I recall myself to myself,
And I discern that my task at the moment is but to open the book,
Not to comment thereupon.
True, some of our veteran pitchers are free agents this year, Schilling, Wakefield, Timlin, Tavares, even Gagne, but I trust the Red Sox management to make the right decisions on who to bring back. With that said, I hope they manage to bring back Mike Lowell. Outstanding defense and great offense are a tough package to replace. I hope A-Rod stays the hell away from the Red Sox and they stay the hell away from him. I know he's good, that's not in question, but he brings more baggage than Brittany Spears checking into yet another rehab. Plus he's far too expensive. No one is worth that sort of money, unless of course he opens up lucrative foreign markets for your team ala Daisuke Matsuzaka. Plus that bush league psych-out stuff Scott Boras pulled during game four should be met by a league wide boycott of A-Rod. It won't be, but that 'd be great to see.
"So here we are, 3 games in Denver, needing to win 2. No matter which side of the fence you’re on I would bet you’ll see two teams playing tomorrow that are playing for their lives. We’ll play this game as if we were down 2-0. We have to because the Rockies are backed into a corner and prior to game 1 of the world series they spent 22 straight games being backed into a corner and won 21 of them." ( link )
It appears that nothing kills momentum like 8 days off and a world class pitching staff. In 18 innings the hapless Colorado Rockies have managed to score two runs. That would be great if their staff pitched 18 shut out innings, but they didn't. Fortunately for us, the Red Sox offense showed how the Sox won the AL East and the AL Championship, patient, disciplined at bats that force the opposing defense to throw strikes, which as often as not end up getting bounced off the Green Monster.
It's getting to the point where if Nicholas Cage is in a movie it's a pretty good indication that it's going to be a crap fest, to wit The Wicker Man. I won't bore you with all the tedious details and my convoluted prose, but take my word for it, this movie sucks. Implausible, ponderous, predictable and worse yet - you never care for Cage's character. In fact I hoped he'd buy it in the most painful way possible. Unfortunately it takes nearly 100 minutes for it to happen. Whoops, that was a spoiler. Sorry.
If you must see a Wicker Man type movie, rent the original with Edward Woodward, it's much, much better. While your at it, rent another fine Edward Woodward film, perhaps his best, Breaker Morant.
Is it me or does Indians pitcher C. C. Sabathia look more than a little like actor Forrest Whitaker?
Academics cringe at the words truth and certainty. They believe that truth and certainty aren’t possible because philosophers have shown that neither empirical
nor deductive knowledge can be made error free.
But in the case of a finite number of discrete entities, such as the chemical elements or the human genes, certainty is an appropriate word.
And in any event, our knowledge of atoms and genes is as certain as our knowledge of tables and chairs, and a lot more certain than our knowledge of human behavior.
From the Papal archives:On the 10th April 1770, he arrived in Rome together with his father and, as guest of many noble and ecclesiastic salons, the “infant prodigy” showed his mastery. He also went to a liturgical celebration in the Sistine Chapel, where he could listen to the Miserere by Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) for two nine-part choirs; already knowing that he could not get the music score because it was strictly prohibited, he transcribed the piece by heart at the end of the liturgy, almost without any mistakes. Mozart so highly impressed the scholars of the Curia that Pope Clement XIV decided to honour the artistic talent of the this boy from Saltsburg by granting him a private audience (together with father Giovanni Battista Martini, another famous musician who Mozart had already met in Bologna), thus conferring him the high honour of the golden army or the “Golden Spur”.
"This is not the best parenting I've ever seen and she needs to be held accountable," Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. said.
Post Secret has some pretty fascinating things, this is not one of them. A. It's not a secret, B. he never did it, C. Emerson? You make up a cock and bull story and you use Emerson? How state school of you!
Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to "spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it." By that logic Rosie O'Donnell should win for spreading awareness of obesity and shrill political discourse. It used to be that you were awarded the Nobel Prize for, you know, actually doing something. Flying around in your Gulf Stream VXI and being driven to rubber chicken dinners in your Escalade motorcade while maintaining 40,000+ square feet of heated, air conditioned, lit and plumbed living space to "raise awareness of global warming" is not accomplishing anything, other than straining the bounds of credibility and hypocrisy.
The worst part of this once prestigious award being granted to Al Gore and the U.N., other than the fact that two more feckless entities could scarcely be imagined, is that even if Gore and the poltroons in Turtle Bay were living in in yurts made of recycled tampons and going to and from work on pogo sticks it wouldn't change the fact that most of everything you hear about global warming is based on junk science. So much so that it's not science at all. My fellow citizens on left who cling to the tenets of global warming the way Richard Simmons' shorts cling to his sweaty thighs, are the first to point out the spurious science involved in intelligent design. Yet 99.9999% of what they believe they believe on faith because asno gordos like Gore have told them so.
Time and again, "researchers" have released reports designed to influence policy and actually do, that upon any serious inspection prove to false. But hey, why bother with facts when one can merely raise awareness?
Good story on global warming from The Cato Institute and another from Reason Magazine.
No possibility of that tactic going wrong, is there? One dimension of committing to an indefinite occupation of Iraq, which means an indefinite war against Jihadist insurgents, is how their depravity seeps back into the US military. We've seen what has happened with torture and abuse. Even if it hadn't been authorized by the president, it's likely some of it would have crept in because of the very nature of the enemy we are engaging. Fighting this war without having it corrupt us is the great challenge we face. It gets harder and harder the longer we stay.
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail,among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.From his Noble Prize acceptance speech December 10, 1950.
I always thought the casting of John Mahoney as the psuedo Faulkner W. P. Mayhew in Barton Fink was inspired, but then again I'm probably the only geek on my block who knows which Coen brother Frances McDormand is married to. (It's Joel, the one who kinda looks like Howard Stern.)
I know I'm a Jewish lesbian and he'd probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon...
I want to be very clear. There are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor — locking up dissidents, executing of gay folks, denying the fact of the Holocaust, potentially adding another dangerous nuclear power to the world and, in general, stifling democracy. Even still, I can’t help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding.
"John Ondrasik, the man who is Five for Fighting, is constantly looking for ways to use his talent to help make the world a better place and does so without any tendentious or childish political narrative. At this link, John has cut a video to his song "100 Years" that movingly addresses the fight against ALS. If you follow the link, good will be done; Glenn Tullman/Allscripts and Bert and Cyndie Silva are each donating $1 for every time the video is played. The video, by the way, is outstanding and moving."
A man goes into a bar and says to the bartender, “If you give me free drinks all night, I’ll entertain your customers so they will stay all night and spend a fortune on drinks.”
“Oh yeah!” says the bartender. “How are you going to do that?”
The man pulls a hamster out of his pocket and puts it on the piano. The hamster runs up and down the keyboard playing the greatest piano music anyone had ever heard. “That’s incredible!” says the bartender.
Then the man takes a parrot out of its cage and puts it on the bar. The hamster begins to play the piano again and the parrot sings along - sounding just like Pavarotti. Everyone in the bar is amazed and stays all night drinking, enthralled by the hamster/parrot act.
The bartender is delighted. “I must have these animals. Will you sell them to me?” he asks, but the man shakes his head no. “Will you sell just one then?” asks the bartender.
“OK, I’ll sell you the parrot for $2000″ the man says. The bartender is delighted and hands over the money.
A bystander tells the now-former parrot owner, “You were crazy to sell that marvelous parrot for only $2000″.
“No way,” the man replied. “The parrot’s dumb as a stump; the hamster’s a ventriloquist!”
Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.
Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.
Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -- Kevin Everett voluntarily moved his arms and legs on Tuesday when partially awakened, prompting a neurosurgeon to say the Buffalo
Bills' tight end would walk again -- contrary to the grim prognosis given a
day before.
"Based on our experience, the fact that he's moving so well, so early after such a catastrophic injury means he will walk again," said Dr. Barth Green, chairman of the department of neurological surgery at the University of Miami school of medicine.
Tribe members were being held by the Coast Guard but had not been charged, said Mark Oswell, a spokesman for the law enforcement arm of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
A preliminary report said the whale was shot with a .50-caliber machine gun, Oswell said.
Coast Guard officials created a 1,000-yard safety zone around the injured whale, which was shot about a mile east of Neah Bay in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The whale had begun heading to sea Saturday afternoon, Oswell said.
Although the tribe has subsistence fishing rights to kill whales, Oswell said preliminary information indicates the whale may have been shot illegally.
"We allow native hunts for cultural purposes. However, this does not appear to be of that nature so far," he said.
Two things: I doubt the tribe used an actual .50 caliber machine gun to shoot the whale. If they did, I wonder what the hell a tribe of 1000 people is doing with such ordnance, other than lighting up the local cetacea. Secondly, doesn't this whole thing kind of harpoon the whole concept of Native Americans living in harmony with nature?
And that's the story of Keen's elites overall. The Golden Age of mass culture
didn't end just because the Internet let people do their own thing. It ended
because people looked at the low - and steadily declining - quality of
mass-marketed television, radio, news, films, and music and concluded that they
could do better. And they are often right, not necessarily because the amateur
productions are so terrific (though sometimes they are), but because the big
media productions are so often dreadful.
A couple of thoughts; First, holy cow he looks like Jack Black in this performance. Secondly, what a gift it is to have sounds like that come out of your mouth and then to stand there on stage and bathe in the adoration. He was a great artist and will be missed.
Actually a third thought occurs to me as well. William F. Buckly, Jr. once said that "Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." True then, true now. But how much greater is it that today, as long as you have broadband internet access, you can listen or watch nearly anything you can think of, or read about pretty much anything ever writen, painted, sculpted, filmed or created. From "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" to "Miserere" it's all there, imagine what the ancient greats could have done with such a wide dispersal of information.
Imagine if John McCain or Jim Webb were in that stall and accidentally did what Craig claims to have done by accident as well. It would take them fifteen minutes to even understand what the cop was talking about. "You think I'm what?!?!" "You're saying I wanted to do what!?!?!" "Because I touched your #$%^*&@ foot with my foot!?" And then McCain/Webb would become a helicopter of fists.
I've been thinking about you.I love that.
You've never really had any fun, have you?
Binh: Never had a good time.
Captain Oh: You should go somewhere new.
Go somewhere clean. Get a new start.
You should go to...
Binh: I go to America.
Captain Oh: I offer you a new life, you choose an old dream.
For a start, the author overstates the immediate unity post-9/11. Even then, there was a big difference between the "righteous rage" crowd and those who wanted to wallow in bathetic weepy let's-hold-hands-and-drone-"Imagine" candlelight vigils and retreat into antiquated tropes about "root causes" like global poverty notwithstanding the middle-class backgrounds of Mohammed Atta and co). The second time round, there won't even be a momentary veneer of unity. The angry left will be demanding by lunchtime "What did Bush know and when did he know it?" and citing eminent scientists such as Professor Rosie O'Donnell to demonstrate that it couldn't possibly have been anything but an inside job. The less angry left will demand not a punitive military response but a 12-month blue-ribbon commission co-chaired by Lee Hamilton to call witnesses and investigate where the administration went wrong. Less motivated types will be convinced - like British public opinion after the Glasgow attack and the sailor kidnappings - that it's blowback for Iraq. And a big chunk of the rest may even plump for the Spanish option post-Madrid: Oh, dear, we seem to have caught your eye. What would it take for that not to happen again?
| You Are 81% Feminist |
 You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action. |
Nelson Muntz has some sage words for 
