More Gore

As if we needed it. But, Gentle Reader, I'm sure you'll like this:

Gore Wins Nobel Prize, High Court Gives It to Bush
by Scott Ott

(2007-10-12) — Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000.

Mr. Bush, who was narrowly defeated by Mr. Gore in the 2000 presidential election, thanked Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito “for swinging the vote my way, and helping me to join the pantheon of great Nobel laureates like Jimmy Carter and the late Yassir Arafat who together brought peace to the middle east.”

Mr. Gore could not be reached for comment as he was returning from Oslo, Norway, in a private jet. However, his spokesman said that his efforts to bring peace on earth speak for themselves.

Heh... to quote a rather famous instantaneous-pundit. RTWT, Gentle Reader, RTWT.

A Minor Mystery and the Usual Stuff

(Note: mystery solved following a mere 15 minutes of googling after I initially wrote this first piece.)

What happened to Mike Fay? His blog, Fire and Ice, went dormant earlier this year without explanation, although I heard he was back in The Sandbox (not true). Now it appears that someone named “Cunnigham” (no typo, that) has commandeered Fire and Ice. Here’s a sample of the writing:

We no longer can swear United States Congress to impeach and take a awful president. The American Capital Post have published an op-ed piece by Henry Martin Robert Dallek that suggests a constitutional amendment to let "ouster by the people" for removing a president other than by impeachment or because of incapacity. Considering the dingy public presentation of Saint George W. Shrub and his disposal and the trouble in obtaining impeachment, this is a mulct idea.

Here are the chief characteristics of the amendment: The recollection process would get by obtaining a 60 percentage ballot in the Senate and House. Populace pressure level on United States Congress could assist it switch determination devising to the electorate. Congressional support would originate a national referendum that would be unfastened to all eligible electors in state elections. Clearly, it should be done fairly quickly.

This is an example of a total, complete waste of bandwidth, and not because of the ideology expressed, and I use “expressed” very damned loosely. It’s the piss-poor writing I’m upset with. Fire and Ice is neither who nor what it once was, and the interloper is gone from the blogroll (and replaced with the url of the real Fire and Ice). Not that the current squatter gives a damn, I’m sure.

I wonder if Mr. Fay knows what’s happening here.

Well, yes…yes he does. It took me a while, but the real WO Fay’s blog is here…he’s alive, well, and producing his usual high-quality stuff. As to the interloper…here’s the story:

First, my original blog, mdfay.blogspot.com, was blogjacked. As my previous post announced, thanks to a BBC link, my site's viewership went stratospherically off the charts. This, it turns out, was a mixed blessing. Someone decided that perhaps they could make a little extra fun money off of Fire and Ice. So they hacked in, changed the password, and made it theirs, sort of. There is no content at my old site, just a variety of links which I suppose are earning someone about three cents a month. Blogger was good enough to locate my content and repost it to mdfay1.blogspot.com with a new password.

Blogjacking. Who knew?

Now it can be revealed…the REAL reason Rove quit:

(2007-08-13) — Karl Rove, the chief adviser to George Bush since 1993, in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, said he would resign from the Bush administration effective August 31, to spend more time with family and to head up the presidential campaign of Democrat front runner Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY.

Mr. Rove called the move “a cold calculated decision to remain in charge of the U.S. government indefinitely.”

“I crave power,” Mr. Rove told the Journal, “and I can’t get my fix working for a lame duck president. I’ve been informally advising future President Clinton for about a year. I have a lot in common with Hillary — mostly notably the ice water that flows through our veins and the unbridled lust to rule the nation with an iron fist.”

Heh. I think the moonbats would kinda like it, if it were true. But then again, Her Hillaryness has her very own Rove-analog…no need to outsource. Which is one of the things that scare me. Just one, mind you.

I haven’t seen today’s weather report from Hell, but one could safely bet it’s cold down there. Via David’s Medienkritik… a link to a lengthy (eight pages!) article in Germany’s Der Spiegel, a positive article about Iraq. A couple of excerpts:

In October, 90 "incidents" were reported in Tameem, an area no larger than a few city blocks in Berlin. Twenty of those incidents involved attacks on US troops by gangs of insurgents. Wherever the Americans went they were shot at from apartment buildings, three times with rockets and four times with rocket-propelled grenades. Sixteen remote-controlled bombs exploded along the neighborhood's streets, 14 homemade explosive devices were found and defused, snipers attacked the occupying troops twice and one hidden car bomb was found, ready for use. And so the story continued: throughout November, December, January and February.

[…]

Since June, Ramadi residents have only known the war from televison. Indeed, US military officials at the Baghdad headquarters of Operation Iraqi Freedom often have trouble believing their eyes when they read the reports coming in from their units in Ramadi these days. Exploded car bombs: zero. Detonated roadside bombs: zero. Rocket fire: zero. Grenade fire: zero. Shots from rifles and pistols: zero. Weapons caches discovered: dozens. Terrorists arrested: many.

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

A remarkable turn-around, especially for Der Spiegel. If you follow the link to Medienkritik, you can see examples of previous Der Spiegel articles that aren’t so…um…positive. And there’s also a link to Victor David Hanson’s latest column where VDH says the turn-about in attitude isn’t all that surprising, given that the same sort of thing is happening, albeit slowly, in the US Congress. Both the Hanson piece and the Spiegel article are worth your time…

 

Today’s Pic: Another photo from this year’s vay-kay, similar to another pic previously posted. SNs One and Three posed with the mo’sickles, just before departure to points both known and unknown. A good time was had by all…

Fort Collins, CO. May. This year.

It's HOT!

Well, the Dog Days of Summer are upon us. This term has always fascinated me from the time I first heard it in the way, way back. The etymology of the term is here…and says, in part:

Popularly believed to be an evil time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies" (from Brady’s Clavis Calendarium, 1813).

The Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose just before or at the same time as sunrise, which is no longer true owing to precession of the equinoxes. The ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that that star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.

While I’m not into sacrificing innocent animals, I’m sure there are more than a few people in other places that would be willing to give it a shot. I feel particularly bad for those folks, and their numbers are legion, that suffer from the oppressive combo of heat and humidity. As for YrHmblScrb, well…not so much. It’s 90 degrees as I peck this out, but the heat index is “only” 89, a function of our relatively low humidity (currently 35%).

This sort of weather always makes me wonder how folks survived prior to air conditioning, particularly in places like N’Awlins…and the entire Gulf Coast, for that matter. I still have painful and vivid memories of long, hot, sleepless nights spent sweltering in the UN-air conditioned barracks at Keesler AFB (near beautiful Biloxi-By-The-Sea) in the summer of 1964.

I’m reminded of this American Standard TeeVee ad for their AC…maybe it’s TOO comfortable (and us, too).



This could be good news, if it’s true. Well, sorta. If it IS true, it’s definitely a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I’ll be able to read David Brooks again. On the other, that skank Dowd and her male counterpart, Krugman, will be unleashed upon the American public again. Maybe the NYT ought to keep TimesSelect. It’s two-to-one FOR keeping it, in my book.

Captain Ed has a similar thought:

Two years ago, the New York Times provided on-line readers with a strong disincentive to read their columnists. TimesSelect, which I called the Firewall of Sanity, charged $50 per year for people who just couldn't get enough of Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich. Now the New York Post reports that Pinch Sulzberger has finally realized that he has marginalized his own columnists in an on-line universe.

To quote another Big Dog: Heh.

Today’s “imagine the disappointment” moment:

Time of Visit: Aug 7 2007 10:01:35 am
Page Views: 1
Referring URLhttp://images.google...1%26hl%3Des%26sa%3DN
Search Engine: images.google.es
Search Words: ladies viagra

Sometimes I really don’t understand why folks click thru. This is an image search, Gentle Reader. And the Ladies of Deuce Four (click the search link, if you’re interested) certainly get a lot of hits…but not for reasons one would expect.

 

Today’s Pic: Apropos of nothing…Granddaughter Anastasia captured celebrating the Fourth in Birmingham, MI (a suburb of Detroit) at my great good friend Kim’s house. A good time was had by all. As always.

July, 2000.

An Inside Story

So. I didn’t blog about it, there being some…no, a lot…of things in the news I won’t touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole. Dan Rather shooting off his mouth about CBS “tarting up” the news by hiring Katie Couric was one such item. There was a grain of truth in the story, however, aside from all the hyperventilating and illogical associations of the phrase “tarting up” and Katie’s own perky self. And that would be this:

From a high of 13 million viewers in her first weeks on the air, Couric is now drawing less than 6 million and the "CBS Evening News” is in last place in the nightly news race, according to the New York Post.

CBS reportedly plans an aggressive promotional campaign this summer in an attempt to boost ratings.

CBS really intends to get to the bottom of this, to an extent that was unknown until this past Tuesday, when IowaHawk blew the whistle. Here’s just part of the “inside story,” according to Ace Detective Dan Rather:

“It just doesn’t add up,” said Moonves, pacing the floor of his office and daubing the sweat from his glistening forehead. “The research boys Q-tested Katie with all the upscale demographic groups. We balanced all the war disaster stories with soft focus celebrity news. And still our numbers are leaking worse than a viewer in our core bladder control product advertising target.”

“Those viewers have to be somewhere, Moonves,” I said. “Maybe it was an inside job. Maybe it was the other nets.”

“No dice Rather,” he said, pouring another shaky four fingers of Ensure into his highball glass. “the audience embezzlers been hitting every precinct in town – ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC. They hit Time and Newsweek so hard that even the dentist offices won’t touch ‘em. If we don’t do something soon we’re gonna lose the Poligrip account!”

“Dan, do you think…do you think this has something to do with the internet mob?” said Couric, a pall of perky horror washing over her mug.

“I’m way ahead of you, baby. We’ve got some bloggers to talk to.”

She kicked me in the nuts again.

“Ow!” I screamed. “What was that for?”

“I thought you were going to slap me again,” she said.

I had to hand it to her. She was learning.

****************
“Where are we going Rather?” asked Couric, slinking into the passenger door of my black Hudson.

“Townhall. We’ve got a surprise date with Cleveland Huey and his crew.” I packed my Sony FV-100 noise canceller mic into its holster in case of trouble.

A few minutes later we arrived at the nondescript hall deep in the Blogosphere Bowery. We pushed through the filthy padded door and made our way to a smoky backroom. Huey was seated at a card table, around which sat a rogue’s gallery of sleazy online opinion slingers: Beantown Barney, the head of the Boston family; Mongo Steyn, the hulking French Canadian punditry thug; Duffer Hitchens, the East End goon with a taste for brutal polemics; and Jimmie Fargo, capo of the Twin Cities blog syndicate.

Jackpot, I thought. I knew they were up to their fedoras in some kind of audience heist. Trouble was, it would be next to impossible extracting information out of them. Hewitt and his gang were notoriously tight-lipped, and were blood-sworn to the Blogosphere code of silence. Getting two words out of this bunch of mutes would be harder than getting a proportional font out of a ’68 IBM Selectric.

“Nice little hideout you got here Huey,” I said sauntering up to the table. Couric’s fingers clutched my arm tightly. “There’s probably enough room here to stash a million or two missing TV news viewers.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, pally,” said Huey, tossing cards around the green felt. “This joint here is a, whattayacallit…”

“Social club,” offered Mongo, discarding a pair.

“Yeah yeah, social club. That’s it. Place for me and the boys to get away from the wives. Play some cards, talk about the weather. How’s the weather in Minneapolis these days, Jimmy?”

“The usual,” said Fargo, shooting me a straight razor glare.

“See what I mean, Rather? Strictly small talk.”

“Yeah yeah, boss, small talk,” said Beantown.

“Shaddup, stupid!” he glared. “Just play your hand, real easy-like.”

“That’s not the word on the street, Huey,” said Couric, angrily. “Word is you and your pals are packing microphones and rolling up a lot of hit counts.”

“Oh sure, doll, we do a little radio, and blog once in a while,” said Huey. “Just a little fun. But I ain’t touched a TV studio ever since I left PBS. Ain’t dat right, Hitchens?”

“I don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’,” said the menacing Limey, slamming back a shot of Yoo Hoo chocolate beverage. “Gimme three.”

“If I were you, Rather, I’d go snoopin’ out in L.A.,” said Hewitt. “That’s where all the action is. Any of you mugs got an 8?”

“Go fish!” snapped Gnat, Jimmy Fargo’s pint sized gun moll.

There’s a happy ending, of course. You can read the rest of “The Ratings Always Drop Twice” here. To quote Mr. Reynolds: Heh.

Today’s Pic: Crank up The Way-Back Machine and set the controls for the summer of 1998 (this being the first day of summer and all). This is SN3 getting ready to go out and stomp in a few puddles. Actually, he’s taking a short break as he had already been out doing just that, with active participation from both TSMP and me. Life’s small pleasures, and all that.

Fairport, NY. July 4, 1998.