MemeMachineGo!

The history of the gryphon and the hippogriff.

The flying, trotting, weasel-eating hippogriff of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a mythical beast invented not by J.K. Rowling but by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (seen at right) in his 1515 epic, Orlando furioso. It was a kind of joke; since at that time “crossing a griffin with a horse” was a metaphor for something impossible or ridiculous. By placing exactly such a creature in his story, Ariosto had positioned himself firmly in the land of lighthearted make-believe.

What’s interesting about this literary conceit is that the griffin (or gryphon—“hooked one” in the original Greek) is another mythical creature, with the head and wings of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion. But for the joke to work—for the hippogriff to be sillier than the griffin—the High Renaissance Italians must have considered the griffin to be a real animal…

There’s been a lot of talk about Kerry’s possible VP choices. But here’s a new one from the source himself.

“I have four words for you that I know will relieve you greatly,” Kerry told the fund-raiser. “How does this sound ? Vice President Hunter Thompson.”

I’m sure this is going to top the blog aggregators by tomorrow, but what the hell. There’s a new job opportunity for women who are hot, technical, and willing to talk dirty: askthetechgirl.com.

If you like super sexy girls with superior tech skills, you’re in luck. Imagine being alone with that incredible girl in your company’s tech dept. After hours.

“Ask The Tech Girl” gives you the rare opportunity to talk live to a super smart and always ready to go tech girl, geek chick or network ops cutie.

The next time you need some help, spice it up and call the support line with a little something extra!

=v= My sister was in town for the 4th of July weekend, which meant seeing some of the sights that New Yorkers only see when we have visitors. The governor staged a July 4th photo-op at Ground Zero, but the Statue of Liberty was unsullied by political slime this year (as opposed to, say, 1986, when Ronald Reagan turned it into a photo-op that included a few hundred Elvis impersonators). We also watched the fireworks from nearby the Brooklyn Bridge.

All of these sites are presumed to be terrorist targets, and at each location there were roving bands of kamikaze evangelists in matching outfits, who'd been trucked in from Kansas, Georgia, and God (presumably) knows where else. They were convinced that we were all about to be killed in a July 4th terrorist attack, and were there to save our souls. I have to admire their bravery, but I was less than thrilled with the contingent who added that God allowed the 9/11 attacks to punish America for embracing homosexuality.

At one point I thought we'd be better off on the other side of the East River, where there's a Jewish neighborhood, not known for proselytizers. The next day, though, I noticed that the Brooklyn Heights Promenade was littered with fliers from Jews for Jesus (the members of which are mostly not Jewish).

Meta-Efficient is “a guide to the most efficient things in the world,” reviewing energy-efficient products.

(Via Vegan Porn)

I saw Spider-Man 2 on its opening day (without even realizing it — I happened to check the movie listings that Wednesday, and there it was — I assumed it had opened the previous weekend.)

It’s got the best superhero fight scenes yet committed to film. Doc Ock made a great villain. If you have any fondness for super-heroics in general or Spider-Man in particular, you should see it. And the story held together pretty well. I mean, I could pick nits, but I decided not to. Especially not when these folks have done such a thorough job.

The Green party veep candidate is so dedicated to anyone but Bush winning the White House that she might vote against herself.

Scary: thousands of teenagers are getting breast implants.

A 17-year-old who saw Dr. Edward Melmed before graduation “thought it would be a fun thing to do,” said the Dallas plastic surgeon, who removes implants and testified before the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel in October. “They regard it as having your hair done or getting a new watch. She had no concept that this was a serious operation.”

Scarier: a doctor in Germany is offering a subcutaneous titanium mesh bra that attaches to a woman’s ribs and muscles.

The effect is claimed to be instant, youthful-looking boobs with invisible lift. […] “The advantage is that a woman with these implants will never have to wear a bra again,” says Saylan.

But have fun getting through airport security with it.

At a Bush Fourth of July public appearance in West Virginia:

Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn’t be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president.

On the 4th of July. When we commemorate having declared our independence from Britain through a document saying we opposed an unelected mentally imbalanced hereditary leader named George.

Updated 2004/7/8: Mike has more

(Via The 18½ Minute Gap)

Like anyone with an MT blog, I’ve been plagued with comment spam for a while. MT-Blacklist helps a lot, and is great for cleaning up after the fact, but every comment spammer starts off without being blacklisted.

One problem is that MT blogs are so consistent in how commenting works that it’s easy for spammers to automate the process. There are some obvious steps to make this much harder that I’d been meaning to implement for a while. This article details the obvious steps along with several less obvious ones, and finally inspired me to make the changes.

This included changing ‘comments’ to ‘replies’ in my templates.Other than that, you, the end-user, should notice no differences.

It is to be hoped that I, on the other hand, should notice not getting slammed by dozens of comments advertising porn sites.

I heard Sean Stewart read from Perfect Circle at Worldcon in 2002. The entire audience groaned in frustration when he concluded — he left off at a killer cliffhanger, and he didn’t even know when the book would be published.

Well, it’s finally here, and Salon has chapter 1 and chapter 2 online. Read them and you, too, can share the pain of Stewart’s audience at Worldcon. But, lucky for you, you can order it immediately.

Mine will probably be in at Other Change of Hobbit today, along with Small Beer Press’s other new title, Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevenson. I did a workshop with Jennifer once, and I’ve been looking forward to this book, too.

A Quebecois blind man with a francophone guide dog was barred from an English immersion course at the University of New Brunswick.

A blind Quebec student, who was denied entry to English classes at a Canadian university because his guide dog responds only to French commands, will be allowed to attend class, the school said on Wednesday. Yvan Tessier was turned away from an English immersion course at the University of New Brunswick because he would be forced to give his dog, Pavot, instructions in French.

(Via Follow Me Here)

Sometimes I feel like I can’t keep up. The Pentagon accidentally destroyed Bush’s service records. Whoops.

Military records that could help establish President Bush’s whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of “numerous service members,” including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush’s claims of service in Alabama are in question.

Strangely enough, there was no word of this when the White House released what they said were all of Bush’s military records earlier this year.

It’s enough to make someone believe the former Texas National Guard officer who said he once overheard a conversation in which there was a request to sanitize President Bush’s Guard records during Bush’s tenure as Texas governor. (Links from a Metafilter thread initiated by August Pollak.)

Updated 2004/7/10: Michelle Malkin notes that the Times has posted this correction:

An article yesterday about the destruction of some payroll records of National Guard members, including President Bush, misstated the record of White House acknowledgment of the loss. The White House indeed took note of the missing information last February when it released hundreds of pages of Mr. Bush’s military files. In a briefing paper for reporters on Feb. 10, summarizing those files, it noted that payroll records for the third quarter of 1972 had been lost when they were transferred to microfiche.

(Regular ol’ un-updated entry resumes…)

Meanwhile, the USDA is preventing a small slaughterhouse from testing all its cows for mad cow disease.

The only thing it needed was testing kits. That’s where the company ran into trouble. By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA said that allowing even a small meatpacking company like Creekstone to test every cow it slaughtered would undermine the agency’s official position that random testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety.

What it didn’t say was that the rest of the meatpacking industry was adamantly opposed to such testing, which is expensive, and had no desire to compete with Creekstone’s fully certified beef. “If testing is allowed at Creekstone … ,” the president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. told the Post, “we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too.”

The Agriculture Department’s Creekstone decision reveals the best thinking of Soviet central planning: The government shoots the innovator to preserve market stability. Though President Bush invokes free-market principles when it comes to industry downsizing, “outsourcing” jobs, media mergers and energy deregulation, those principles apparently have their limits when a company seeks to become an industry leader in consumer protection.

(Via Ethel the Blog)

Meanwhile, Orcinus compares and contrasts two Supreme Court decisions. Regarding having Dick Cheney reveal his secret energy task force documents:

Why do the president and his advisers need to be shielded from document searches by groups such as the Sierra Club? The justices answered that question by stressing “the paramount necessity of protecting the Executive Branch from vexatious litigation that might distract it from the energetic performance of its constitutional duties.”

It added that “all courts should be mindful of the burdens imposed on the Executive Branch in any future proceedings.”

And regarding Jones v. Clinton a few years ago:

Petitioner’s predictive judgment finds little support in either history or the relatively narrow compass of the issues raised in this particular case. As we have already noted, in the more than 200 year history of the Republic, only three sitting Presidents have been subjected to suits for their private actions. See supra, at 9-10. If the past is any indicator, it seems unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the Presidency. As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner’s time.

Of greater significance, petitioner errs by presuming that interactions between the Judicial Branch and theExecutive, even quite burdensome interactions, necessarily rise to the level of constitutionally forbidden impairment of the Executive’s ability to perform its constitutionally mandated functions. “[O]ur … system imposes upon the Branches a degree of overlapping responsibility, a duty of interdependence as well as independence the absence of which `would preclude the establishment of a Nation capable of governing itself effectively.’ ” Mistretta, 488 U. S., at 381 (quoting Buckley, 424 U. S., at 121). As Madison explained, separation of powers does not mean that the branches “ought to have no partial agency in, or no controul over the acts of each other.” The fact that a federal court’s exercise of its traditional Article III jurisdiction may significantly burden the time and attention of the Chief Executive is not sufficient to establish a violation of the Constitution. [emphasis added]

There’s more, but, like I said, it’s hard to keep up.

Wonkette is going to cover the Democratic Convention for MTV.

One question lingers: Is Ana Marie’s name avant-garde enough to connect with MTV acolytes? “No. I’m not even, like, Tabitha or Serena,” she told us yesterday. “I am totally old for them. I can’t be Sway but maybe I could be Lean, or Listing, or an archangel to compete with Gideon. Or I could use my porn star name, my childhood pet and street names: Muffin Witchwood.” Over to you, Muffin.

She elaborates:

The concern about my being too old for MTV is real, though I try to keep up with what the young people are into. I understand that this band “The Outkast” sells a lot of phonograph records. And I look forward to meeting the star of “Punk-ed,” Ashley Kutcher, and his lovely special friend, Michael Moore. Another concern are the security risks at the convention; Maureen Dowd writes today that the Secret Service is advising journalists to bring gas masks.

I think I’ll just bring duct tape. (Like I’m not wearing some right now!)

First thought: “I’d be willing to actually turn on the TV for that.”

Second thought: “Oh yeah. I don’t have cable.”

I didn’t pay much attention to wonkette.com in the beginning — why would I want to read D.C. gossip? Fortunately I followed enough links there over time to find out that Wonkette’s damn funny.

I just got this, which Google indicates has been making the rounds for the past couple of weeks.

Subject: CONGRATS YOU WON (LUCKY STRIKE LOTTERY)

FROM: THE LOTTERY COORDINATOR,

INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT

DEAR SIR/MADAM,

RESULTS FOR CATEGORY “A” DRAWS

Congratulations to you as we bring to your notice, the results of the First Category draws of LUCKY STRIKE LOTTERY UK. We are happy to inform you that you have emerged a winner under the First Category, which is part of our promotional draws. […]

You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of £6,500,000 (Six million, five hundred thousand Great Britain Pounds), which is the winning payout for Category A winners. This is from the total prize money of £13,000,000 shared among the 2 winners in this category.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Your fund is now deposited with our transfer agents CASH CHANGE UK LTD and insured in your name. In your best interest and also to avoid mix up of numbers and names of any kind, we request that you keep the entire
details of your award strictly from public notice until the process of transferring your claims has been completed, and your funds remitted to your account.

This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming or unscrupulous acts by participants/nonparticipants of this program.
We also wish to bring to your notice our end of year premium stakes draw where you stand a chance of winning up to £50 million; we hope that with a part of your prize you will participate.

Please contact your claims agent immediately for due processing and remittance of your prize money to a designated account of your choice […]

N.B: Any breach of confidentiality on the part of the winners will result to disqualification. Please do not reply to this mail. Contact your claims agent immediately.

The “tell anyone and you’re disqualified” bit is really a nice touch. This guy actually replied, and got the expected response:

Now I have 48 hours to return their form requesting my bank account information and the funds will be transferred after I pay a fee of 3,560 British Pounds up front.

And this woman violated their confidentiality requirement, and was told:

This is what I was told by the Better Business Bureau (and I quote): “International lotteries are illegal to US citizens and are often scams. These lotteries fall under the jurisdiction of the US Secret Service. Please contact them for further assistance.”

This is what I was told by my state’s Attorney General’s Office (and I quote): “International Lotteries are illegal to Citizens of the United States. Anyone entering and/or winning one of these lotteries are subject to stiff penalties and possible prison terms.”

That bit was news to me.

The Art of the Healing Buddha:

During the fall of 1998 the 5th grade students at Pocantico Hills School worked with Miss Ruth Weyland and Mrs. Terry Hongell to create a children guide to an exhibit of Tibetan Art. The children studied about Tibet and about Buddhism in order to understand more about the art works in the exhibit, “The Art of the Healing Buddha.”

See the mandalas.

We began by studying about Tibet, its people and its history. We studied about meditation and made Mandala’s. A Mandala is used in Hinduism and Buddhism. “A mandala is a source of meditation that the Tibetans use to show your soul and trying to get to the center or to show the universe and everything that is in it.”

Nick’s mandala:

On the outside there is lake of blood from people trying to get to the center. Then there is lighting for the people who crossed the Blood Lake. Then is the hunted gold mine. Most people run out of the hunted gold mine because they were scared. The explosives, they sense motion, then they explode. The temple is guarded by four guards at each entrance. Once inside the temple you try to find what you need. Something to drink…. PEPSI!

(Via Discordian Research Technology News)

The University of Missouri is having a hard time finding someone to fill the Kenneth Lay Chair of Economics.

The University of Missouri-Columbia is still seeking someone to fill the professorship donated by Kenneth Lay, the MU alumnus indicted on charges related to the fall of Enron Corp., the company he once led.

The campus issued a three-sentence statement this morning after federal authorities unsealed an indictment against Lay that charges 11 counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and making false and misleading statements. “While University of Missouri-Columbia officials understand that Ken Lay has been indicted, they feel it is important to let the judicial process run its course before taking any action,” the statement read. “The university will not speculate on any future actions.”

In 1999, Lay donated Enron stock to finance a chair in his name. MU sold the stock for $1.1 million and placed it in an endowment. Advertisements for the chair were posted as recently as February, but the position has remained vacant since Lay’s donation.

Go figure.

(Via Fark)

Americans need to watch what dialogue they write in the margins of crossword puzzles.

“How are you?” asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.

“Uh, fine — thanks,” I replied, wondering, why are you asking?

As if she’d read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I’d been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I’d just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.

But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”

She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word “bomb.” “What does this mean?” she demanded.

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.

I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. […]

Carted away, the writer is faced with the pitch meeting from hell.

Without further explanation, they took me to the onsite police station, where I waited for an “interview” with the Transportation Security Administration. By then I was being accused of writing “bomb” on a piece of paper and waving it around for people in the back of the plane to see. While two policemen guarded the door, the honcho behind the desk informed me that my choice of dialogue was unfortunate, that life was not a stage play and that the tiniest thing can ignite fear in American travelers these days. He wanted a summary of my novel’s plot to get the context for why I’d written what I had.

I panicked. If five years of working on this narrative couldn’t liberate me from software sales, how was a five-minute pitch going to keep me out of jail?

I think this one is probably even worse that the guy who couldn’t fly because he was reading an Edward Abbey novel.

(Via The 18½ Minute Gap)

Best personal ad ever.

I weigh approximately 175 pounds (subject to g = 9.8 m/ss), and am neither a dragon nor a pinata. […] You should like words, science, and video games. But you shouldn’t be ugly either. Or male. Or a zombie dragon, powerful in life, unstoppable in death.

Go read the rest. It has illustrations. And a flow chart.

I hope this guy is getting laid like a rock star.

(Another link shamelessly lifted from Discordian Research Technology News)

Ever wonder what the Vikings ate when they set off to explore the new world? How Thomas Jefferson made his ice cream? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why? Welcome to the food timeline. This is what we’re all about.

A survey titled Reading at Risk reports:

Fewer than half of Americans over 18 now read novels, short stories, plays or poetry; that the consumer pool for books of all kinds has diminished; and that the pace at which the nation is losing readers, especially young readers, is quickening. In addition it finds that the downward trend holds in virtually all demographic areas. […]

The survey also makes a striking correlation between readers of literature and those who are socially engaged, noting that readers are far more likely than nonreaders to do volunteer and charity work and go to art museums, performing arts events and ballgames. “Whatever good things the new electronic media bring, they also seem to be creating a decline in cultural and civic participation,” Mr. Gioia said. “Of literary readers, 43 percent perform charity work; only 17 percent of nonreaders do. That’s not a subtle difference.”

And here I thought Flowers for Trinitron was satire.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a great article on the current color shift.

We’re going through one of those periodic big shifts in fashionable colors. IMO, the last really big one of those was at the end of the 80s, when blues went more cyan, reds lost most of their blue undertones, and yellow came back into the palette. They all looked good against black. […]

I’ve known people who think official color reassignments are a conspiracy theory. The short answer is that they are a conspiracy, but they aren’t theoretical.

I’m so happy to be hopelessly out of fashion…

Microsoft’s latest FUD about open source software: it costs jobs.

At the roundtable, Gates, also Microsoft’s chief software architect, emphasised how damaging open source software can be. “If you don’t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source.”

Gee, and I wonder just whose job he’s worried about?

You remember Real Ultimate Power, the Official Ninja Webpage.

Hi, this site is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS. This site is awesome. My name is Robert and I can’t stop thinking about ninjas. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Facts:

1. Ninjas are mammals.


2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.


3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

Well, Robert’s got a book out.

Basic reasons why you should buy REAL Ultimate Power—The Official Ninja Book.

1. It will teach you about ninjas.


2. Ninjas are awesome.

Basic reasons why you shouldn’t buy REAL Ultimate Power—the Official Ninja Book

1. You’re a moron.


2. You’re an idiot.

And to publicize his book, it looks like he’s made up this story about it being banned in Nebraska.

The incident occurred at Carol Miller’s Nebraska home on Friday. According to Ms. Miller, her two sons, Mathew, 13, and Zachariah, 15, had obtained a copy from the bookstore and were “diddling around with it in the living room.” As they were doing so, Miller states that the boys became “rambunctious and uncontrollable” and excited their family dog to jump up and bite their baby brother’s lip.

This is supposedly an AP story, yet doesn’t seem to exist anywhere other personal web page at UCLA imitating a copy of an MSNBC story. And it doesn’t appear in searches on MSNBC. And it has typos. And it looks suspiciously like an ad for Robert and Real Ultimate Power.

But it still works as free publicity — heck, I’m commenting on it in public right now.

In this revolting story, a photography student is harassed by private security, police, and Homeland Security for photographing the Ballard Locks near Seattle while having brown skin, even as they ignored paler photographers.

You can read his own account at his blog, Brown Equals Terrorist — look for the Artist’s Statement. (Indirect link due to the Artist’s Statement being supplied by mirrors and I don’t trust those links to stay stable.)

That’s not what I want America to be.

But a Seattle photographer is planning a mass photo shoot at the Locks in protest.

Now, that’s what I want America to be!

Y’know what’s wrong with milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee? There’s not enough blood in ‘em.

Scientists at the Voronezh State Technological Academy have developed a method for processing blood and turning it into food products such as milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee, Interfax quotes the academy’s administration as saying. Voronezh scientists noticed that every meat packing plant wastes about 7 tons of blood daily. […]

In related news, vegans just started reading chocolate products’ ingredient lists that much more carefully.

(Via Vegan Porn)

The children of privilege subjected to twisted eugenic experimentation! Nude photos of Hilary Clinton. And George Bush. And Miss Manners. The Strange Case of the Ivy League Posture Photos has got everything but Elvis!

One afternoon in the late 1970’s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

It seems it was standard practice for decades at several Ivy League schools to photograph incoming freshmen in the nude as part of student orientation. Miss Manners comments on it (while pointing out Mona Lisa Smile’s shortcomings.)

There are censored photos here and here, and uncensored negatives in an article in this magazine (pdf.)

All links are from this Metafilter thread where there are links to even more articles on the subject.

Yowzer. Some dude has amassed a complete collection of every comic DC has published.

For those of you who have trouble visualizing the enormity of the task, that’s over 30,000 individual comic books! Amazingly, with the exception of a small handful of items toward the end of the quest, this collection was achieved the old-fashioned way with a lot of legwork and mileage, scouring comic shows and stores large and small from coast to coast. Almost no Internet usage was involved in assembling this amazing collection.

“No bits were harmed in the making of…”

Among the more esoteric items in the collection is the two-volume set of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, published by DC in 1978. With a print run of only 35 copies, these books contain stories left over following the infamous “DC Implosion.” Printed for copyright purposes, these were distributed internally to creators whose work it featured. […]

The almost final book in the collection was the romance title Girls’ Love Stories #56, a nothing-in-particular issue of a nothing-special title that was simply frustratingly difficult to locate. Acquired in late 2002, this was thought to be the end of the long road, until the discovery of the obscure Golden Age DC comic, the Fat and Slat Joke Book. Once this additional piece became known, a copy was acquired within a couple of months, in early 2003.

I wonder if he’d be my new best friend?

Talking with the booth babes at a gamer convention:

I ask if she’s comfortable with so many guys posing with her. “It’s weird when they put their arms around me,” she replies, “but then I feel them shaking and I’m like, whatever, if it’s so important to you … it’s funny when guys come up to me and tell me that it’s their first time touching a girl.”

Finding Bobby Fischer:

Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer, wanted since 1992 for playing a tournament in Yugoslavia despite U.N. sanctions, was detained in Japan for an apparent passport violation and will be deported to the United States, media reports said.

Fischer, was stopped at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to go to the Philippines, an airport official said on condition of anonymity.

The stakes are high.

Fischer spoke arrogantly to the press about the irrelevance of the sanctions, and practically dared the United States to keep him from playing. Annoyed, Washington decided to make an example of him; the Department of the Treasury issued a cease-and-desist letter to Fischer, stating that if he played chess in Yugoslavia, he would be in violation of Executive Order 12810. The penalty for defying the order was a $250,000 fine, ten years in prison, or both.

The above article also details what a nutcase Fischer has become.

Your burglar style is no match for my grandmother style!

Vasquez first tried to enter the woman’s home through a window around 1 a.m. Saturday but the glass broke, which woke up the woman, according to Zill. […] The two eventually calmed each other down and sat on the couch. But as soon as they did, Vasquez’s stomach growled and as most grandmothers would, she promptly stood up, went to the kitchen and got her guest something to eat, Zill said.

She offered him eggs, but according to Zill, the burglar wanted a banana and a glass of milk instead. […] The woman then pulled out some pictures of Saint Theresa and a church nametag and prayed next to him, hoping he was religious. She also showed him pictures of her grandchildren and shared stories about them, according to police.

Eventually, Vasquez needed to use the restroom. Demonstrating that manners must never be forgotten, even during a home invasion, when he returned from the facilities, Vasquez thoughtfully communicated to the woman that he had used the last of the toilet paper, Zill said.

He then sat back down, and promptly fell asleep.

The children’s book that Bush continued to read for 7 minutes after being told about a plane hitting the WTC was My Pet Goat. Check out its Amazon reviews.

I just couldn’t put it down! Certainly much more interesting than Richard Clarke’s memo of August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States”.

Why, hell! Clarke didn’t include any illustrated pop-ups!

(Via Xoverboard)

Terrorism won’t be in the next edition of the DSM.

Terrorists are sane and not paranoid madmen, a leading expert says.
Dr Andrew Silke, a UN advisor and forensic psychologist at Leicester University, says terrorism is a political, not a psychiatric diagnosis. He said legal reports showed members of groups such as Al-Qaeda were motivated by violent events and the desire for revenge.

Them crazy head-shrinkers. Next, they’ll be telling us it’s more complicated than that the terrorists just hate freedom.

Right-wing spin:

In March of this year, al Qaeda turned the Spanish election on its head with its railroad bombing and defeated the favored candidate from the party of pro-Iraq war President Jose Maria Aznar and elected an anti-war socialist instead. […]

Bush’s surrogates should bring to America the message that the terrorists would be overjoyed to see the end of his presidency.

During the Cold War, American politicians regularly used to campaign as the candidate the Russians wanted to lose. Bush’s people should begin to speak of the message a Kerry election and a Bush defeat would send to the terrorists. The Spanish example is worth citing.

It is obvious that Osama and his allies all want Bush out. It might profit Bush’s supporters (though not the president himself) to point out this obvious fact to the American people.

A take on the Spanish example from those well-known left-wing extremists at the Cato Institute.

According to the conservative conventional wisdom, Spanish voters, in an appalling act of cowardice, reacted to the terrorist bombings in Madrid by ousting the party that had loyally supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, and especially the war in Iraq.

Such an interpretation profoundly misreads the election results. […]

The outcome of Spain’s election was a referendum on Iraq policy, not policy toward Al Qaeda. Allegations of appeasement are a despicable slur against a population that has already suffered grievously.

Everyone in the blogosphere linked to Homeland Security studying how the elections could be delayed in the event of a terrorist attack, leading to speculation that Bush could be the first president to have been elected for neither of his terms.

Now, if the terrorists want Bush out, and a terrorist attack would delay the election, potentially keeping Bush in, then just exactly who would benefit from a terrorist attack prior to the election?

Actual Al-Qaeda statement:

Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation. Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected.

And speaking of subverting democracy, go read Billmon on the End of the Third Republic.

Rasputin was hard to kill.

[Prince Felix] Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace on the pretext of his wife Irina needing his attentions as a healer. In a dining room in the palace basement, the two plied their guest with poisoned wine and cakes; when the Siberian peasant failed to die, they repeatedly shot Rasputin in the chest, back and head, and beat him around the head with a dumb-bell handle. They then tied the purported corpse into a sheet and dropped it through a hole in the ice into the river Neva, where the sturdy peasant finally drowned, having drifted under the ice, still fighting to free himself.

Even harder to kill is the story that his penis was preserved.

Mike Augustine, of Davenport, a small ocean-side community north of Santa Cruz, was forthcoming. Hell, yes, he’d owned Rasputin’s penis. In 1994 at a storage locker sale he’d bought as a job lot the effects of a Dr Roberta Ripple, onetime president of the Santa Monica Writers Club. Her possessions included her own unpublished stories of World War II women - The U.S. and US and the intriguingly titled Steel Ships and Iron Women - as well as three type-written manuscripts by Marie Rasputin - a hagiography of her father, My Father Rasputin,(with assistance from Roberta Ripple) a sub-Zhivago story of a Russian princess at the time of the revolution My Boots Are Narrow, and a short article entitled ‘Wreck of An Empire’.

Among these papers, in its own velvet pouch, was a wizened, black object resembling the uncircumcised helmet (glans) of a penis. An accompanying note identified it as Rasputin’s genital appendage and said that Marie Rasputin had been given it by Rasputin’s maid and former lover, who claimed she’d been present at his dismemberment. […]

The penis had resurfaced as a news item in The Daily Telegraph’s Weekend Section on (the date may be significant) 1 April 1995. A photograph shows someone called Victoria Blakey-Porter of Bonham’s holding between her thumb and forefinger an item which, the article says, was alleged to have been Rasputin’s penis. It had been included in a sale of relics and scientific instruments, along with Marie’s manuscript biography of her father, but on close examination in a pathologist’s laboratory, it turned out ‘not to be human’. It was, in fact, a desiccated sea cucumber. It was summarily withdrawn from the sale and, presumably, disposed of.

And now a Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburgh claims to display Rasputin’s penis.

Director Igor Knyazkin said he bought the object from a French antiquitarian for €6 600.

I haven’t been able to find anything on the web about the provenance of the French antiquarian’s instance of Rasputin’s penis.

I did not find this corroborating evidence particularly convincing.

Rasputin’s great grandchild John Nekmerson is currently living in the US. He is a grandchild of Matrena Rasputina, Rasputin”s favorite daughter. After her father was murdered, she fled to Europe and afterwards migrated to America, where she began working as a tiger-tamer. She died in 1977. Recently, John Nekmerson has visited St. Petersburg in order to see his ancestor”s private part with his own eyes. The great grandson exclaimed, “This is really it, I’ve got the same one!”

Title from the lyrics by Boney M.

Sumana has a plan to reform the House of Saud.

Bush loses another vote.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency for two Republican presidents criticized President Bush’s record on Monday, calling it a “polluter protection” policy.

Russell E. Train, who headed the EPA from September 1973 to January 1977 - part of the Nixon and Ford administrations - said Bush’s record on the environment was so dismal that he would cast his vote for Democrat John Kerry.

“It’s almost as if the motto of the administration in power today in Washington is not environmental protection, but polluter protection,” Train said. “I find this deeply disturbing.”

I used to post about environmental issues a lot. I don’t, much, anymore. It’s not that there isn’t plenty to say.

But environmentalism is a long-term concern. And it’s overwhelmed by my short-term concern of ending up a serf under a Republican Thousand Year Reich, with a boot stamping on my face forever.

First, let’s restore a democratically elected goverment to the U.S., and then you’ll hear me bitch and whine about Kerry’s environmental policies.