I Don't Get It

What is this about, anyways? I should think you'd be forgiven for calling your former captors just about anything, but in Australia, calling Iraqi hostage takers "assholes" is apparently a bad thing.


More and funnier on the topic from Hubris.

Nicely Put

Ace and his commenter Geoff explain one of my pet peeves about liberals. Ace's original post on the subject here.

Tom Cruise is Nuts

The Superficial has the whole story. I kind of like the guy, but he better stop speaking his mind or we're going to have to crucify him.

Groovy, Baby

I had heard about a Major League Baseball player pitching a no-hitter on LSD, but I thought it was Bill Lee, the "Spaceman" of the Boston Red Sox. Turns out it was Dock Ellis of the Pirates, on June 12, 1970. Boingboing links to a great story about it here:

Thirty-five years ago, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate and future Texas Rangers pitcher Dock Ellis found himself in the Los Angeles home of a childhood friend named Al Rambo. Two days earlier, he'd flown with the Pirates to San Diego for a four-game series with the Padres. He immediately rented a car and drove to L.A. to see Rambo and his girlfriend Mitzi. The next 12 hours were a fog of conversation, screwdrivers, marijuana, and, for Ellis, amphetamines. He went to sleep in the early morning, woke up sometime after noon and immediately took a dose of Purple Haze acid. Ellis would frequently drop acid on off days and weekends; he had a room in his basement christened "The Dungeon," in which he'd lock himself and listen to Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly "for days."

A bit later, how long exactly he can't recall, he came across Mitzi flipping through a newspaper. She scanned for a moment, then noticed something.

"Dock," she said. "You're supposed to pitch today."

Ellis focused his mind. No. Friday. He wasn't pitching until Friday. He was sure.

"Baby," she replied. "It is Friday. You slept through Thursday."

Good story. Go read it.

Charlotte Church, the Last Rock Star

Who knew teen "Voice of an Angel" Charlotte Church was such a party animal? Homegirl is hard core and doesn't care who knows it. From Perezhilton.com.

More Delicious Cruelty

And I thought this was mean. Check this and this out if you want to know the true meaning of online cruelty to celebrities. They do kind of deserve it, though. Some more than others:

Punching Cameron Diaz in the face has to be the most gratifying feeling in the world. And now that a precedent has been set, I’m gonna go buy a bunch of long flowing gowns and just kinda walk around where I think she might show up. So, if you guys wanna hang out or something, I'll be the real handsome guy walking around Malibu in a wedding gown with a ten foot train and a kendo stick. And if you look behind me and Cameron Diaz is walking up, cover your ears cause you're about to hear a loud snap. Followed by a bunch of crying.

I'd try award shows if I were him.

Steyn Begins

Mark Steyn has written a lovely column that, after a short Batman Begins movie review (sort of), is about the Boxing Day Tsunami, and how much of the aid well-meaning citizens of the world sent has never gotten to the needy:

A couple of days later I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual — the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where ‘it’s what you do that defines you’, we’d be heaping praise on the US and Australian militaries who in the immediate hours after the tsunami struck dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food, restore water and power and communications.

Instead, a fellow Quebecker of my acquaintance sneered, ‘Can you believe those Americans? A humanitarian disaster strikes and they send an aircraft carrier!’ Er, well, yes. Because for large-scale humanitarian operations it helps to have a big boat handy. It seemed unlikely to me that even your average European politician would utter anything so fatuous in public, but Clare Short came close. The sight of Washington co-ordinating its disaster relief efforts with Australia, India and Japan outside the approved transnational structures was too much for her. ‘This initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,’ she told the BBC. ‘Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.’

Whether or not it has ‘moral’ authority, the UN certainly can’t do the job. It becomes clearer every week that Western telly viewers threw far more money at tsunami relief than was required and that much of it has been siphoned off by wily customs inspectors and their ilk. If you really wanted to make an effective donation to a humanitarian organisation, you’d send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy.

But that would be in a world where we’re defined by ‘what we do’. Instead, on tsunami aid, what matters is what we feel inside, and when it comes to showing what we feel inside on the outside we can only do it through the proper channels — by sending a donation to the Indonesian Customs Inspectors’ Retirement Fund, or by demanding our government double/triple/quadruple/whatever its contribution to the ‘relief effort’, which means a man in a UN office in New York, who’ll hold a press conference announcing they’re sending someone to the region to conduct an ‘assessment’ of the ‘situation’, just as soon as the USAF emergency team have flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel. The tsunami farrago would be a scandal but, like Western aid piling up on the docks in Indonesia, right now we’ve got more UN scandals than we need — Oil-for-Food, Darfur, child prostitution rings at UN peacekeeping missions.

The passionate hostility of Miss Short and co to action — to getting things done — is remarkable, but understandable. Getting things done requires ships and transport planes and the like, and most Western countries lack the will to maintain armed forces capable of long-range projection. So, when disaster strikes, they can mail a cheque and hold a press conference and form a post-modern ‘Task Force’ which doesn’t have any forces and doesn’t perform any tasks. In extreme circumstances, they can stage an all-star pop concert. And, because this is all most of the Western world is now capable of, ‘taking action’ means little more than taking the approved forms of inaction.

There's much more, and it's most excellent.

Ouch

Even for me, this is too cruel. That is one brutal anagram, for starters.

Perspective Check

Also from American Digest, a link to Dean Esmay's post about Iraq combat deaths, with graphs, links and some excellent comments below, including this one by Dean:

By almost any measure you'd care to name, there has never been a more successful military operation in American history. Yet most people today actually snort in derision at such a notion--no matter how provably true it is, or what evidence is put before them.

Why? Because a small band of fascists is still setting off bombs over there every day, mostly killing innocent civilians. THAT IS THE SUM TOTAL OF THEIR PROOF. Fascist lunatics are still setting off bombs. Therefore, we're failing.

This is, as others have said, the direct result of the Vietnam generation of radicals who took over the universities and filled every subsequent generation of young journalism students, and students in general, with the notion that America was evil and Woodward and Bernstein were the greatest heroes in journalism history.

The press is no longer on America's side--indeed, they routinely conflate "taking America's side" with "touting the administration line." What more can be done except to point out to these people that the facts simply don't fit their interpretation?

Also some highly reasoned and reasonable anti-Iraq War comments, too. Check it out.

Best Thing You'll See All Day

Awesome. From Gerard at American Digest, who rightly explains it's a long download, but well worth it.

Took You Long Enough

Good boy. Now try not to say anything unbelievably stupid for a whole week. And Lileks is right, as he often is:

Of the Strib's [Minneapolis Star Tribune's] defense of Sen. Durbin I have nothing to say. Any editorial that describes Gitmo as a “hellhole” has no words left for any other actual holes o’hell, unless we’re going to layer hell like Dante, with different tiers for different states. I will note that more elderly people died of the Paris heat than appear to have perished from Gitmo conditions, but of course that doesn’t reflect on Paris, Parisiens, or the ability of the French to make air conditioners cheap and readily available.

UPDATE: Video of Durbin's apology, from the Political Teen, Via Wizbang.

Yea, Verily Patrick Swayze is Our Savior

If you haven't been following Road House Revisited over at Hubris, here's a great place to start. Sure, it's the end, but all 10 of the other chapters are linked. Great stuff.

Also, a fun Sean Penn parody here. From Beautiful Atrocities.

I Heart Gitmo

Well, I don't exactly heart it, but I don't have a problem with it. And neither does Mark Steyn:

I’m not arguing the merits here so much as the politics. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about how to categorize these people. As things stand, they’re not covered by the Geneva Conventions — they’re unlawful combatants, captured fighting in civilian clothes rather than uniform, and, when it comes to name, rank and serial number, they lack at least two thereof, and even the first is often highly variable. As a point of “international law”, their fate is a matter entirely between Washington and the state of which they’re citizens (Saudi Arabia, mostly). I don’t think it’s a good idea to upgrade terrorists into lawful combatants. But if, like my namesake the British jurist Lord Steyn, you feel differently, fine, go ahead and make your case.

Where the anti-Gitmo crowd went wrong was in expanding its objections from the legal status of the prisoners to the treatment they‚re receiving. By any comparison — ie, not just with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot — they’re getting better than they deserve. It’s the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the “mustard-baked dill fish”, “baked Tandoori chicken breast” and other delicacies. These and other recipes from the gulag’s kitchen have now been collected by some Internet wags and published as The Gitmo Cookbook.

Whatever's going on there, it isn't torture. Calling it that is stupid and counterproductive.

First Hibiscus Flower of 2005

First Hibiscus Flower of 2005
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

It's a crispy hot day here, 101 by a thermometer ten feet away from this plant and 97 by a local TV station's reckoning. Not at all humid by Austin standards, just 41%. You can tell by the wrinkly edges that I just started watering a little while ago. Thank God for our drip system, a sprinkler would probably kill half the plants we have in sun like this, even at 6:30 p.m.

There are a bunch of other blooms about to pop, and I couldn't be more excited. Gardening is cool.

Hey, Dick Durbin!

Shut the f#ck up.

From Ace.

UPDATE: Another reminder of what real torture is, from the Jawa Report. Link from Beautiful Atrocities.

Funny Business

There's nothing inappropriate about a juror attending a celebration for the guy she recently helped acquit that's being thrown by the accused's family, is there? There is? Hey, that doesn't mean she was biased in his favor, though, does it? It does:

Among the approximately 400 people who arrived at the Chumash Indian Casino was juror Pauline Coccoz. When she walked into the casino and heard Jackson's music playing, Coccoz said, the enormity of what had transpired hit her.

"They were playing 'Beat It,' and I almost started to cry," she said as she waited to enter the showroom.

I vote death penalty for both of them.

Either Pure Genius, or (Even Better) Unintentional Hilarity

Boingboing has a great link to a post about a bootleg copy of Star Wars III: ROTS that is translated to Chinese and then back to English, and the subtitles are understandably hilarious. I've been a fan of Japanese/Chinese to English translations since the first one I ever read. For example, "Revenge of the Sith" is translated as "Backstroke of the West." Awesome.

Move Over, Shocker

Do the Lynndie
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

That was the title of an email sent to me by Scott C. in Chicago, linking to this. It's a collection of people "Doing the Lynndie," posing for pictures in the style of that little she-troll Lynndie England. She will be forever infamous for posing in so many Abu Ghraib pics with naked Iraqis (and other Middle Eastern men, since they were "insurgents" and therefore mostly not Iraqis).

This is a challenge to you camera-wielders out there: get your Lynndie on, and send the results to me so I can post them. Skinny, I'm talking to you.

UPI: the New Reuters

United Press International dropped a load of dogsh*t on us today, in parts. First this gem:

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

Ah, the thoroughly debunked "Bush did it" conspiracy theory. You had to be a complete moron to buy this nonsense when it originally surfaced, and Popular Mechanics was kind enough to do the heavy lifting on it in March. The problem with conspiracy theorists on this type of thing is that they try to reverse engineer "what must have happened" from a unique event and what they think they know about how the world works. If war proves anything, it's that mass destruction is unpredictable and stranger than fiction. Things that shouldn't happen do and things that should happen don't. Trying to prove a conspiracy by arguing that a building collapse looked like a controlled demolition or that not enough plane debris was found is beyond stupid.

But the UPI isn't done yet:

Two years after President George W. Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" in Iraq, some thoughtful officers are beginning to question who the insurgents actually are. In a recent interview the head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers key trouble spots, including Baquba and Samarra Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary Iraqis would take up arms against U.S. forces because "they're offended by our presence." Taluto added, "If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could (want to fight us). There is a sense of a good resistance, or an accepted resistance. They say 'okay, if you shoot a coalition soldier, that's okay, it's not a bad thing but you shouldn't kill other Iraqis.'"

I guess that's why so few Iraqis have been killed by this "resistance." Oh that's right, they've killed far more Iraqis than soldiers, coalition or Iraqi Army. The "insurgents" aren't ordinary Iraqis, as Taluto well knows. I don't doubt that the presence of foreign military units is offensive, but that's a much more complex issue than "America Bad." I wouldn't be surprised if this were taken out of context. I sure hope so.

Allegedly: MJ Gossip

But is still delicious. Datalounge has a many-page discussion of Michael Jackson in which one of his former publicists (supposedly) talks about MJ's weirdness in a very frank and informed way. Allegedly. It goes on for 12 pages, select pages at the bottom and search each one for posts marked "MJ Former Publicist." If the guy's lying, he's got some good inside info anyways.

From the Superficial.

UPDATE: Link only works during off-peak hours unless you're a paying customer, and peak is any time a lot of people are linking to it. Which is likely to be a lot in the next week or so, I should have excerpted some of it because it's very interesting.

The Bad Guys Win Again

Satan Jackson
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

It's no surprise that millions of dollars can buy a not guilty verdict, but I've had it with you, MJ. I don't care if the plaintiffs were money-grubbers, you're still a monster who needs to be incarcerated for the good of the rest of us.

Since that's not going to happen, I just want you to disappear. I don't care if you had a tough childhood, I'm sick of you and your behavior. Go molest some other nation's kids, as you threatened to do before the trial. Kill yourself, move away, fly to the moon, whatever. Just get out of the public eye and leave me alone. I've had enough of your ghoulish face and even more scary habits.

Sweaty Conversational Dynamite

I love Emerald Bile because Noreen and Ball Bag find a way to say what I often feel pretty succinctly while being hilariously profane and offensive. And while I'm not in agreement with much of this post about gay people (I have usually liked the gay people I've gotten to know more than I like most straight people), I do find part of it fairly representative of the way I feel about gay culture:

I also wonder why they think that most straight people they meet are gay. People like me who like rugby and beer and smoking and manly stuff are secretly gay according to gays. Apparently we are trying a little bit too hard to be straight. Does that mean that they are secretly straight? A gay man who wears make-up and enjoys showtunes is trying a little bit too hard to be gay, so therefore must be straight.

I also kind of agree with this part:

I don't understand why they all talk in that strange gay accent they use and why do they call everyone a bitch, even men? It irritates me. Did they always talk in that voice, or did they just start doing it when they realised they were gay?

It's offensive and discriminatory to think such a thing, but I can often identify a gay accent as easily as a french or spanish one, so there must be something to it. I've known some people who spent time in other countries and came back to the US with a permanent accent change (one friend spent a year in Australia and still sounds vaguely Aussie), and I myself tend to adopt the accent of whatever person I'm talking to in an alarmingly short time, so I know a different way of speaking is easy to adopt, but the whole gay accent thing is kind of interesting. Any thoughts, Skinny?

What It's All About

In an era of athletic bad news, it's nice to read a genuinely thrilling, beautiful, touching sports story. From American Digest, where there's a lot of good stuff today.

Check Out the Organ on This Guy

Bear's Breeches Flower Spike
Originally uploaded by Uncle Mikey.

This plant is called Bear's Breeches for some strange, unknowable reason, and it's got a flower spike over six feet tall, taller than me. That's one huge sex organ, and it's interesting because the flowers are along most of the spike, not just at the end. They don't smell like anything in particular, but they do look nice.

Every time I see it, I wonder what a bear would look like in pants.

Cool New Snoop/Zep Mashup

Drop It Like It's Hot/Whole Lotta Love. Very cool. From Boingboing.