Month: October 2003

Darth Swank reports on a Defense Department memo, reported in the USA Today, which doesn’t quite back up the “Everything’s comin’ up roses!” view of the War on Terror. Glenn Reynolds, of course, is incensed at the leak (this from the guy who kept maintaining that the Valerie Plame affair was “too confusing”), which is unfortunate because it’s not clear that this is a leak at all, and anyway, the Department of Defense has put the memo up on their website. Now, I’m far from an expert here, so let me know if I’m wrong. But it doesn’t seem to me that memos intended to be confidential get posted to the Web, even if they get leaked.

I sometimes get the feeling that if Reynolds were the Captain of an English ocean liner on its maiden voyage, his reaction to being handed a note informing him that a very large icefield lies ahead would be to light all the boilers and go full steam ahead.

Share This Post

Posting here may be a bit more sporadic than usual next week, as the Amazonian Queen Wife will be on vacation, which will mean setting aside my usual routines in favor of day-trips and whatnot. And Halloween is coming up, which means…well, I’m not sure what that means, except that I remember that my daughter is perhaps old enough to discover the joys of Milk Duds.

(I’m being facetious there. I hate Milk Duds, the most godawful candy in existence. Any candy that requires presoaking in lye just to render it chewable is not a candy I want on any kind of regular basis, even if it is only yearly.)

Oh, and check out John Scalzi’s kid’s costume. Apparently she likes to play with things before annihilation. Our kid’s going to be Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz. Except she’s blond. Go figure.

Share This Post

Mike of Mike’s Baseball Rants, who doesn’t think too highly of Joe Morgan as a baseball pundit, might appreciate this: I was driving last night when the game started, and heard the first two innings on the radio. Very early on, Joe Morgan (the color-commentator on the official radio broadcast) says something like, “The Marlins will benefit defensively as the night goes on and the field dries out.” I thought that odd enough to begin with, since the game was at night and presumably there wouldn’t be a whole lot of evaporation going on.

But then, after I was home for a while and checked in on the game in the sixth inning, it was raining. So much for Joe’s prediction.

(I actually like Joe Morgan a lot, but Mike’s commentaries on him are usually very funny.)

Share This Post

In an amazing twist of blogging fate, the guys over at Dead Parrots somehow ended up, for a time, with a post of their being Google’s Number One site for “Steve Bartman” — the Cubs fan who went for that infamous foul ball. The resulting traffic to their blog was, shall we say, staggering.

In that single day, they picked up about half as many hits as I’ve had in the entire time I’ve been writing this blog. Wow.

Share This Post

Earlier this morning I was flipping past channels, heading for PBS so the kid could watch Sesame Street, when I just happened to catch about five seconds of Alan Colmes, the “liberal” who occupies the seat next to Sean Hannity on FOX News’s “fair and balanced” show (in which Colmes always sits meekly by while Hannity foams at the mouth, shouts, interrupts, and generally behaves like Bill O’Reilly). Colmes’s appearance this morning was on (I am not making this up) The 700 Club. I didn’t watch any more than what I happened to see, so for all I know, Colmes got into a flaming debate with Pat Robertson and struck a blow for liberal decency and all that. (I doubt that.)

I did catch Colmes apparently defending himself against accusation that he serves no useful purpose on the show, by saying “I am not a potted plant!” That made me laugh. From what little I’ve seen of the Hannity and Colmes show (not much, admittedly), maybe Colmes is right: he’s not a potted plant. He’s that clump of dead root-bound soil that you discard from an old pot before refilling it for use with a new plant.

Share This Post

Still stealing stuff from Warren Ellis, a nifty new gizmo might be unveiled in Britain next year:

A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk in real time could make its debut in Britain next year. Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide.

I assume this description will put any fan of the original Star Trek in mind of the Guardian of Forever, from “The City on the Edge of Forever” (incidentally, the greatest single episode of Star Trek ever, in any series):

Share This Post

Literally.

It seems that the Powers-That-Be in Bangkok want to avoid President Bush and other luminaries being exposed to their city’s riverside slums, so their solution is to put up a giant curtain, obscuring the view of the slum.

Talk about “Out of sight, out of mind” as a policy regarding the poor….

(Via Warren Ellis.)

Share This Post

The UPS man dropped off a package for me, which was sent in my direction at the behest of one of my regular readers. Thank you, Michelle!

(And don’t think for one second that I’ve abandoned my efforts at coercing you into Blogistan on your own….)

Share This Post

Time for some Guy Gavriel Kay stuff. This time, we have early cover art (which is very tentative and subject to change) for the new novel, The Last Light of the Sun. On the left is the Canadian cover art, and on the left is the American version.

And that reminds me, I really need to watch the DVD of this movie one of these days. I bought it really cheap at Target just a day or two after coincidentally finding some enthusiastic reviews about it online. Also, my current plan after reading The Iliad and The Odyssey is to read my copy of The Sagas of the Icelanders. I’ve basically decided lately to start reinforcing my background in reading all the really old stuff.

(UPDATE: An alert reader — a little too alert, if you ask me, harumph! — points out that my above description of which cover is Canadian and which is American is in violation of at least one Law of Physics. Thus, the one on the right is the American cover, tentatively. Those responsible for the error will be sacked later today.)

Share This Post

Hyper-reclusive author Thomas Pynchon, of whom there are no pictures in existence, will “appear” on The Simpsons. Wow. You gotta love the literary chops of The Simpsons.

(via Jessa Crispin.)

Share This Post