Rejected Additional Airline Security Measures.

From an unreleased Transportation Security Administration (TSA) document outlining additional security measures to be implemented in the wake of the failed Christmas Day attack on Delta Airlines flight 253.


10: No carry-on luggage will be allowed - checked baggage only. In addition, passengers to disrobe, pack clothes in baggage and fly nude.

9: Baggage described in item 10 to be flown to destination via different flight, and preferably on a different airline.

8: Potential passengers will be required to recite Pledge of Allegiance prior to boarding. Those unable to do so to the satisfaction of the TSA will not be boarded.

7: Seating will be assigned in the following order: Christian Americans will be seated first. Non-Christian Americans may be seated second, upon successful completion of additional screening procedures, including, but not limited to, recitation of a Bible passage to be selected by TSA personnel in their sole discretion. Non-American passengers will not be boarded under any circumstances.

6: Potential passengers observed, heard, or rumored to be complaining during screening process will not be boarded.

5: Passengers will remain seated, with seatbelts fastened, during final hour of flight. For the purposes of security, it is assumed that an attack on the aircraft is imminent, that the aircraft will be destroyed, and that the aircraft is therefore in its "final hour of flight." As a result, passengers will remain seated, with seatbelts fastened, for the entire duration of the flight.

4: On-board televisions will be turned off. In addition, passengers will be prohibited from using any electronic devices, including, but not limited to, computers, cell phones, Blackberries, hand-held gaming devices, radios, televisions, cameras, music players, and any other device whatsoever, whether hand-held or not, and whether electronic or not.

3: Passengers will face forward and refrain from speaking during the final hour of flight (see item 5).

2: Passengers may not blink, twitch, shift, move, sigh, moan, mumble, nod, speak, sing nor hum during the final hour of flight (see item 5).

1: Effective immediately, 95 of every 100 passengers will be deputized as a Federal Air Marshal. To encourage volunteers for this program, potential Air Marshals will be exempt from screening procedures 2 through 10.

Ring-billed Gull.

Click here for a larger version (1024x680) in a new window.

A Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis), photographed in Cleveland, Ohio. Nikon D40 with 100-300mm D lens at 300mm, ISO1600, 1/1000 sec exposure at f6.7.

Gobble, gobble.

Like most of the other 60 billion pounds of people in America, we treat ourselves to a proper gorgement every Christmas. After all, it's only appropriate that our profligate spending be reflected in our dining habits. Otherwise, the whole Orgy Of Holiday Seasonal Activities would seem unbalanced. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, then multiply that by the exponentially-increasing number of pennies and pounds.

So it comes to pass that on Christmas night, the three of us - me, The Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet, and She Who Will Put Us In A Home (formerly known as The Kid) - sit down to a dinner that can't be beat. (Not only can it not be beat, it's never even been tied, and we've frankly given up any hope of even being considered to be in the same league. But I digress.)

There's always turkey and stuffing and gravy and sweet potatoes and some kind of other vegetable and there's usually mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and Yorkshire pudding or homemade bread.

And when we have Christmas at home, there's just the three of us, so there's always leftovers. There's only so much of a ten- or twelve- or fifteen-pound turkey and its accompaniments that three people can eat at one sitting. While I can take some small comfort knowing that evolution will probably provide our distant descendants with (a) accordion-like stomachs which expand to accommodate enormous holiday meals or (b) fewer nerve endings between the ribs and pelvis to leave them blissfully unaware of their distension, it doesn't help our present situation. For that, we undo our belts, push away from the table and await dessert.

[Permit me another digression: having read the previous four paragraphs, I can't say I am surprised that people in the Third World might hate us.]

Anyway, as I was saying, there's only so much we can finish off at the first go. Leftovers abound. There are usually big bowls of stuffing, of gravy, of starchy tubers, and somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of an uneaten turkey left behind. Into the fridge and freezer they all go, to be picked over for the next two or three weeks, to be made into sandwiches and chili and hash browns and expanded midriffs.

But I've always thrown away the carcass of the bird and (usually) within hours remembered that I'd wanted to use it to make soup. Then I'd spend a little time cursing myself for forgetting and a little time cursing my family for wanting nothing to do with retrieved-from-the-garbage turkey soup.

This year, though, I remembered my soup plan before pitching the bird and saved the carcass. And today I made my first-ever turkey soup. I found a recipe at Allrecipes.com for After-Thanksgiving Turkey Soup (I know), secured the necessary ingredients (encountering as I did so an unprecedented shortage of half-and-half in the city's grocery and convenience stores which nearly forced me to use pumpkin spice flavoured coffee whitener in its stead) and set to work.

I tweaked the recipe a bit - less butter (I mean, who really needs a cup of it?), more of just about everything else to accommodate the extra broth I ended up with, and a couple of hours later, ta-da! Turkey soup. And pretty tasty, too.

But here's the thing: now, in addition to the big bowls of stuffing and gravy and eight pounds of leftover turkey, I've got six quarts of soup. It's really good, but it's six quarts.

So when New Year's Day comes and She Who Will Put Us In A Home begins 2010 as a vegetarian, I'll merely be in Week Two of The Year Of Eating Leftover Turkey-Based Products.

Careful With That Axe, Eugene.

I'm still certain that the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet has no idea what she's in for, but she wanted - heck, she insisted - that my Christmas present this year be a guitar.

An electric guitar.

She said, "I want to hear you play again." Before I met her, I owned a couple of electric guitars, but by the time we met, they were both gone and in their places I had a pair of acoustic guitars - a six-string Harmony and a twelve-string Takamine that was a gift from a previous girlfriend.

I seldom played the twelve-string; it was hard (for me) to play and hard (for me) to keep in tune. We sold it one month when we were short of cash. I felt little regret at letting it go, figuring that it would be better off in the hands of someone who knew what he or she was doing with it.

The six-string was easier to play, but when I moved from Canada to the US I left it behind, accidentally on purpose, in the old apartment. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have done that, but it made sense at the time. But here we are now, seven years removed from the last time she heard me play a guitar, long enough for the memories of buzzy strings, missed notes, atonal chords and (inevitably) the same bits played again and again and again to fade from her memory, leaving only the sweetly romanticized notion of me playing an instrument.

So I said "No, thanks."

That was my first mistake. You don't say no to the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet. (Well, maybe you say no to her, but I sure don't.) So, after a few days, I carefully considered the error of my ways and said, "Let's go look at guitars."

Now it's five days later and I'm the proud daddy of a Squier Deluxe Stratocaster and a Vox Pathfinder 10 practice amp.



And you should see the look on the cats' faces when I turn up the gain.

When Santa Drinks.

One year sometime in the early '90s I did some cartoons in MS Paint to amuse my coworkers as Christmas approached. The cartoons have been unseen for years. For a while I'd had them posted on Geocities but it was one of those free disappearing sites that blinked out of existence without warning, (as distinct from the other Geocities sites, which blinked out of existence in October after Yahoo! decided its free crappy websites weren't worth the trouble). Luckily for me - and now for you - the cartoons were saved on our home PC, where they've been trapped since about 2001 - that computer had no CD burner and its replacement, and its replacement, and then that machine's two replacements didn't have floppy drives.

It only occurred to me a few days ago that I might be able to create a small network to connect that old computer to one of our new ones. (Yes, I am also the kind of guy who much later has brilliant comebacks to people's remarks. My rejoinders last week to that guy who made fun of my hair would have shut him up but good, had he not died years ago.) But I digress: my point is that the network worked, the files were transferred, and my cartoons live again.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you When Santa Drinks.






But Christmas isn't just about giving, it's about getting and it's about selling. In keeping with that True Spirit Of Christmas, if you want to get some When Santa Drinks Christmas cards, I will be delighted to sell some When Santa Drinks Christmas cards to you.

So, just for people like you and me and everybody, When Santa Drinks Christmas cards are now on sale at Zazzle! Surely you have a hundred friends you need to send cards to this year! Buy now! Buy often! Buy too many!

Maybe he meant, "there's lots of seasonS left."

Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Luke Schenn told a reporter the other day that the team wasn't happy with its performance.

"We didn't want to start this way," he said, "but there's lots of season left."

So say what you will about the Leafs, but they don't know the meaning of the word "quit," and they certainly don't know how to read a schedule.

Twenty of their season's 82 games have been played and the Leafs have won three of them. At the rate they're going now, they'll be lucky to finish with a dozen wins. (For you non-hockey-fans who may be asking yourself if that's good, ten of the other 29 teams in the league already have 12 or more wins this season, so, no, that's not very good at all.)

Here's how bad the Leafs are: if they were to set for themselves what other teams might consider the modest goal of winning half of their games this season (a goal, incidentally, that 14 of the other 29 teams in the NHL are currently meeting or exceeding), they would have to win 38 of their next 61 games. That's a .623 winning percentage for the rest of the season.

"Surely that's doable, right?" asks the theoretically representative die-hard Toronto fan. Don't bet on it: the last time they did put up numbers like that was in the 2003-2004 season, and the last time before that was in 1961. In fact, they've only ever managed it six times since 1927.

So, anyway, Luke: there's always next season, right?

The fine art of the sales pitch.

In today's mail, a come-on from Vonage: "As a valued former Vonage customer, we have a special limited-time offer just for you: Come Back to Vonage and get" - and then, in big orange letters that got even bigger and oranger as the sentence concluded - offered me exactly the same price as I had been paying before I cancelled the service. Or, to put it another way, twice as much as the rate they offered me two months ago when I called them to cancel.

It's a bold strategy - if at first the customer doesn't go for the lower price, try raising it back to the original price - convince them that not only were they wrong to stop buying it then, their refusal was an insult. An insult! Hell, why not double the price and teach those impertinent peons a lesson?

I'm holding out until Vonage asks for $200 a month, a kidney and the right to crush my testicles on demand. You know, just like my cell phone company.

We're gonna need a bigger Gitmo.

An article by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post says that the FBI told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September that its terrorist watch list contains over four hundred thousand "unique names".

They say "anti-terrorism," I say "paranoid much?"

They're adding about 1,600 names a day to the list, for crying out loud. (For comparison, an FBI agent who served on a CIA–FBI task force hunting bin Laden has said that al Qaeda's membership list in 2001 contained 198 names.)

Four hundred thousand potential terrorists in the USA? Come on. You're telling me that America has twice as many potential terrorists as it does Army Reservists?

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, you wouldn't be able to find diesel fuel or fertilizer anywhere.

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, there would be explosions in airplanes, subways, shopping malls, airports and football stadiums every day of the week.

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, they'd have a company health plan, a 401-K, some sort of employee day care program, and, most importantly, at least one employee stupid enough to blog about what they were up to.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll just go hide in my basement. Wouldn't want the terrorists to get me.

Empty Buildings.

At the top of Wheeling Hill, near the plaque commemorating McCulloch's leap and the statue erected by the Kiwanis Club to commemorate the Indians who once lived here - the same Indians who were killed or defeated and driven from the Ohio Valley by military men like McCulloch - there is a small stand of buildings.

The Old Windmill Pub has been empty for a few years and the property is for sale. Four or five houses sit next to it. Some have boarded-up windows and are vacant; the others look rundown and tired. They all face a row of garages that have all but collapsed off their pillar foundations and tumbled down the hill on which they're built.



The Old Windmill Pub. Click on image to launch larger version in new window.



The Old Windmill Pub. Click on image to launch larger version in new window.



Abandoned garages on Wheeling Hill. Click on image to launch larger version in new window.



Inside an abandoned garage on Wheeling Hill. Click on image to launch larger version in new window.



Peeling paint on a dresser. Click on image to launch larger version in new window.

What you might find in a dyslexic nephrologist's office.

The Band With Nearly As Many Names As Members

We saw an excellent show in Pittsburgh's Club Cafe last night, billed as "An Evening With The Minus 5, The Baseball Project and The Steve Wynn IV," which was really just a bit of crafty misdirection inasmuch as the same four people comprised all three bands, making it just about impossible to tell which group was playing which song.

(Readers who require a more rigid structure may wish to imagine that The Minus 5 opened, playing an energetic and muscular set during which Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Minus 5 were followed by The Baseball Project, featuring Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn singing about baseball legends like Fernando Valenzuela, Satchel Paige and Harvey Haddix while their guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Steve Wynn IV showed its versatility in the second set, with the bandleader supplementing fiery licks and crunching chords on his Fender Jazzmaster with howling harmonica work, while Buck took turns playing rhythm guitar on a blue and white Rickenbacker twelve-string as McCaughey took over the role of the Airline pilot's with the steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat.)


Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey.

But no matter which band was playing, they were killing, their chops were great, and that they were having fun was obvious, as was the crowd in the Club Cafe. They played nearly forty songs during their three-plus hours on the stage, including a version of Neil Young's "Revolution Blues," a track on the band's sold-only-at-gigs Butcher Covered disc.


Steve Wynn.

Between the first and second sets, the band members signed autographs, chatted with fans, posed for pictures and sold a little merchandise. (Peter Buck was an especially convincing salesperson - if the whole rock'n'roll thing doen't work out for him, he might have a future on QVC.)

And have I mentioned that Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat?


Linda Pitmon.

Now, if only they could pick one band name and stick with it.

The Fine Art Of The Apology.

Joanne Brazel-Wheatcroft, mentioned in an earlier post for describing Joe Wilson, the candidate for Superior Court Judge in Washington, as a "BIGOT" and an exemplar of "what assholes the republicans are," has finally apologized for erroneously directing her invective at Mr. Wilson. She had, of course, meant to call the Joe Wilson who is the Republican member of Congress those names.

It turns out to have been an easy mistake to make, for, as Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft notes in her apology, "I saw two old men on facebook and assumed they were the same person."

Joe Wilson, the candidate, is 49 years old. Joe Wilson, the congressman, is 62.

Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft's shoe size is 6, and her favourite flavour is Manolo Blahnik.

Tom Hank's volleyball from that movie has been getting hate mail, too.

byoolin's law: Statistically speaking, your neighbour is just fuckin' stupid.


The other night, the President of the United States said that "what we have also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have toward their own government.... unyielding ideological camps... an opportunity to score short-term political points... [and] confusion has reigned."

Tell that to Joe Wilson. He's got people logging onto his Facebook page to tear him a new one, calling him a bigot, blaming him for "the mess we are in," comparing him - unflatteringly - to Rush Limbaugh and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, or accusing him of having "no class what so ever." The occasional poster thanks him for his "courage" or "for speaking the truth and for [his] public and military service."

But - and this is a big but - the odds are pretty good that those people meant to excoriate (or praise) Joe Wilson (R - SC), the Congressman who yelled, "You lie!" during the President's speech to Congress on Wednesday, and not the lawyer from Snohomish County, Washington who is running for Superior Court Judge.

Now poor Joe Wilson is left with a Facebook page that's been hijacked by people like Joanne Brazel-Wheatcroft, who call him "BIGOT!" and say that he's "proved... what assholes the republicans are." When her error is pointed out to her by a conservative poster, she attacks his "grammer" and notes that "I did manage to find "the" Joe Wilson after I realized my mistake. I am not a republican, so I can admit I made a mistake, but I have corrected it!"

Since Ms. Brazel-Wheatcroft has not, as of this writing, apologized to the candidate Wilson, one might reasonably infer that correcting her mistake means that she's since redirected her sentiments to the congressman Wilson.


Click on the image or here to launch a larger version in another window.

Let's hear it for the electorate!

If, Then, Else. Or not.

For a couple of weeks now, The Kid She Who Will Put Us In A Home has been crossing her fingers every time she tried to use her cell phone. The phone's been on its last legs for a while, a victim of its own success. She Who Will Put Us In A Home uses it like FOX 'News' uses the phrase "Death Panels." The paint is gone from half a dozen letters on QWERTY keypad and from two or three buttons on the phone's face, the slider is showing signs of metal fatigue like you'd see on the wings of a 747 after a barrel roll and its battery holds a charge about as well as a very large man with very buttery fingers holds a very tiny screw.

The phone finally died yesterday evening.

Anticipating this, I'd sent She Who Will Put Us In A Home an email the other day listing a few of the better-rated phones available under our carrier's (Rhymes With Bint) plan and told her she could pick one and I'd order it.

I logged on to my carrier's website to place the order. When I got to the checkout page, there wasn't an option to change the shipping address. She Who Will Put Us In A Home is in college now (he said, beaming with pride) and it only makes perfect sense to ship it to where she is, rather than have Rhymes With Bint ship it here and have me ship it there. (Have I mentioned that her phone no longer works?)

I clicked on the button to talk to a live customer service person. Jessica immediately sprang to life in a pop-up window. The pertinent portions of our conversation are transcribed below (Rhymes With Bint helpfully includes an "email a transcript" button with its live chats).

JESSICA: Thank you for visiting Rhymes With Bint. What questions can I answer for you today?

ME: I am ordering a phone to replace the one my daughter is using. I would like to have it shipped directly to her at college but I do not seem to have that option. Am I able to ship to an address other than my home?

JESSICA: You will have the option 'shipping at different address' on the Final Checkout page. Do you see 'Shipping at different address' option on your current page?

ME: No, that's not an option.

[JESSICA asks me whether or not I can see a number of other things on the page, all of which I can. Then she asks me what the 'total charges' are and which phone I ordered.]

JESSICA: To confirm your eligibility for an upgrade, may I please have your billing ZIP code and the telephone number of the device you would like to upgrade? If you would like to check your upgrade eligibility status in the future, you can visit www.Rhymes With Bint.com/upgrades.

ME: I already know I'm eligible... zip is XXXXX. Number being upgraded is xxx-xxx-xxxx. My login page tells me that that number is eligible for upgrade.

JESSICA: You are eligible to receive a $25 instant rebate with a one-year contract extension and a $75 instant rebate with a two-year contract extension. When you upgrade your device online today, we will waive the $18 upgrade fee as well as the shipping and handling charges.

ME: Yes, I know that. And that's all in the billing details. But my problem is that I want to ship the phone to my daughter at college. How do I change the shipping address? *That* is the question.

JESSICA: As you don't find the option 'shipping at different address' on your Final checkout page, you cannot get it shipped at your desired address.

JESSICA: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

"Anything else"?

In retrospect, I think I may have missed an opportunity to ask them if they could also not do some other thing they already don't do, if only to have them tell me again about something I already know.

The Short, Happy Life of Greener The Tobacco Hornworm

I was standing on the sidewalk in front of my townhouse one Friday afternoon when The Neighbour Kid suddenly asked, "What's that?"

She was pointing at a caterpillar that was as big as the finger she was pointing with. It was bright green, striped, and had a quarter-inch-long curved red hook at one end. It stood motionless on a stalk of one of my cherry tomato plants.

I told her that I didn't know what it was and went inside to get my camera. I grabbed a little plastic storage tub at the same time. I wasn't going to let the caterpillar eat my tomatoes, but it was a beast too fascinating to squash, so I decided to make it my guest for a while. The Neighbour Kid said she might like to take it to school on Monday, if I could figure out what it was.

It was a tobacco hornworm - Manduca sexta, more formally, and Greener, somewhat less so.





Greener and his cousins, the tomato hornworms, eat things like tobacco and tomato plants. They've evolved ways of neutralizing the toxins in tobacco plants - like nicotine - while still being able to enjoy that cool menthol taste.

They're voracious eaters - on Sunday afternoon I watched Greener chew up a section of leaf the size of a quarter in about two minutes - that devour your plants and grow quickly before turning into Carolina Sphinx moths. I was looking forward to seeing it.

A few hours later, I knew that wasn't going to happen. At about 7:30 I noticed a single white nodule, no larger than a grain of rice, on Greener's back. It was a braconid wasp larva.

Braconidae are a natural control for hornworms: adult wasps lay their eggs in the hornworm between molts, and the wasp larvae grow inside the hornworm for a couple of weeks; all the while the hornworm goes about his usual business - which is to say, eating my tomatoes. Then, at the end of the two weeks, the larvae emerge through the hornworm's skin.

In the time it took me to look up that information online - about twenty minutes - Greener went from having one larva on his back to having eighteen.





Within half an hour, he had more than fifty larvae on him, each one slowly rotating at its unattached end as it spun a coccoon.





By Monday morning, Greener's rear end was covered in coccoons. By Monday evening, The Neighbour Kid was not so interested in taking Greener to school.

Once the larvae emerged and spun their coccoons, not much happened that anyone could see. The coccoons got darker as the pupae developed. Greener eventually stopped eating and a week after the first larva popped through the skin, Greener was dead and the little plastic tub was filled with several dozen braconid wasps. They're tiny - only about an eighth of an inch long - and look like blackflies to the naked eye. Under magnification, though, they look every bit like a wasp.









The wasps themselves live for about two weeks. Each female will lay eggs in as many as 200 hornworms during that time. Greener's friends are in deep doo-doo.

Mack Maxidyne, near Triadelphia, West Virginia

Spined Micrathena

The spined micrathena (micrathena gracilis), or spined orb-weaver, builds a new web every day and takes it down every night, writes Jeffrey K. Barnes of The University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum: "At dusk, the female ingests virtually every strand of the web except frame threads, on which she remains until morning. She rebuilds the orb at dawn."

This one was just a few feet from my front door.



Full-size version of this is here.

...so this would be a "miss."

Storefront, Murray Avenue, Pittsburgh

Dr. Dean.

Former Vermont Governor Dr. Howard Dean, at Joseph-Beth Books, Pittsburgh PA.

Top Ten Instantaneous Reactions To The Sentence "Octomom gets two-hour TV special":

10: Is there a punctuation mark more interrobangy than the interrobang? Because a mere "WTF!?" just isn't going to suffice here.

9: I would rather watch my mom get an enema.

8: That's it, I'm moving back to Canada.

7: Just knowing that this is on another channel makes me feel like I'm wasting the $13 a month I spend on Basic Cable.

6: I'm pretty sure it's just going to be a rip-off of Part One of Monty Python's "The Meaning Of Life."

5: Well, if they get Scott Hamilton to co-host and call it "Disney's Clown Car Vagina On Ice" I'm sure it will do well.

4: Somewhere, a production assistant is wondering, "How is spending three weeks changing diapers on someone else's *@$&@$^^#% kids going to help MY career?!?"

3: [Four minutes of head-shaking vigorous enough to cause a contrecoup injury.]

2: Even if only Octomom and her kids watch it, the thing's going to be a ratings HIT!

1: It still can't be worse than that live Rosie O'Donnell thing.

Ten Most Infuriating Provisions Of The New Health Care Bill.

10: In addition to free health care, Kenyans entitled to weekly massages.
9: Canadian-style hospitalization rules mandate Labatt Blue I.V. drip for all patients.
8: Tea-Party-related injuries not covered.
7: People of colour not required to sit in back of ER waiting areas.
6: Carrying of concealed firearms by anesthetized patients forbidden.
5: Before being euthanized, elderly patients to be used as test subjects for live organ transplants.
4: Mandatory recycling of bandages and sharing of casts.
3: As cost-saving measure, hospital gowns to be 3 inches shorter.
2: Surgical masks to feature advertising.
1: Poor people will have access to basic medical care.

One of these things is not like the other.

"Well, you like that Ricky Gervais fella in the British version of The Office, and you were always talking about how funny he was in Extras, too, so naturally we thought you'd like this movie that didn't have Ricky Gervais in it and was about that airplane crash in the Andes where the survivors had to resort to cannibalism to stay alive."




(Full-size (484x398) image here.)

Another dissatisfied customer.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Something for @Bartlett'sFamiliarQuotations.

Recently, I happened to refer to my followers on Twitter as "tweeple," which, for those of you who don't know, is what one calls Twitter people.

It turns out that my wife, the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet, is one of those who didn't know that, and asked me, "Did you just make that up?"

"No," I said. "That word is as old as Twitter itself."

Idle Thought Occasioned By A Single Line On "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

Jon Stewart quoted that old saw, "Nature abhors a vacuum." He repeated the word for emphasis: "ABHORS."

Then it occurred to me that the Universe, i.e., all of Nature, is mostly vacuum. Another old cliché debunked.

You're welcome.

Movie Review: "Orphan"

"Orphan"

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabel Fuhrman, Aryana Engineer, Daniel Coleman and CCH Pounder (as the Poundee).



You know it's a bad movie when... you come out of it annoyed at the person who suggested seeing it.

...you take a pee break in the middle and wash your hands... TWICE.

...you step out to ask someone at the concession for the nutritional information for your bag of popcorn.

...you start composing a snotty letter to Roger Ebert during a lull in the scary music.

...you ask yourself, "How would Michael Bay have improved on this film?"

...the heroine's nipples are showing through her t-shirt and you think, "Nope. Too late."

...you realize you're missing a re-run of "I Survived A Japanese Game Show" on ABC.

[Please, feel free to suggest your own.]

Another small victory for the terrorists.

Thousands of people were evacuated from a JPMorgan Chase office building in Columbus, Ohio on Tuesday after an employee spotted "a black, boxlike device with lights, wires and a timer in a first-floor conference room" and called authorities.

Employees were evacuated to the parking lot, where some were overcome by the day's heat and had to be treated by paramedics.

Later, Chase spokesman Jeff Lyttle explained to the Columbus Post-Dispatch what the terror device was: "It has lights on it and sits in front of you, and when you have two minutes left, it prompts you; and when you have one minute left, it prompts you."

And when it's just sitting there on a desk, it scares some people shitless.

On the bright side: no use of truncheons.

In his Washington Post chat earlier today, Gene Weingarten opined that the Henry Louis Gates arrest and was less about race and more about "the casual arrogance of a police officer who expects compliance and has the power of arrest."

Another fine example: the Mobile, Alabama Press-Register reports that police got called to a department store because a man had been in the store's bathroom for an hour. When the cops couldn't get him to come out, they fired pepper spray under the door, pried it open and then tasered him. It was then that they found out he was deaf. And *then* they arrested him for disorderly conduct and held him for six hours until a magistrate refused to uphold the charges.

They dropped him off in his driveway.

From the Press-Register story: "'When he walked in, his shirt was ripped, and he was just in a daze.' his brother, Brodrick Love, said. 'When I went outside, they (the police) took off. They stamped on that pedal.'"

The story doesn't make it clear when the cops knew that in addition to being deaf, Antonio Love is mentally challenged, having the faculties of a ten-year-old.

A Mobile police department spokesperson told the Press-Register that "Use of the Taser and the pepper spray appear to be justified according to the department's policy."

What kind of "policy" says it's okay to taser and pepper spray an ill, deaf, mentally retarded person?

Birther Control.

It strikes me as ironic that the very people so certain that Barack Obama is not fit to be President because he's not American are the very people you'd think would be most likely to understand his situation. The Birthers, as they're called, seem to be unanimous in their conviction that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and they all seem to be Christians.

What does one have to do with the other?

Well, I don't know anybody who's ever seen Jesus Christ's original birth certificate, either. And the same people who dismiss Obama's birth anouncement recorded in The Honolulu Advertiser two weeks after the event and unearthed a couple of months ago seem to be somewhat more credulous about Jesus' birth anouncement, which recorded on scrolls written centuries after the event and unearthed several centuries after that.

These people who seem to think that Obama can't be President because, they think, he was really born in Kenya or Indonesia or Hawaii are the same people who are perfectly comfortable with the King of Kings being from Israel. Is there some kind of continuum where being a foreigner is acceptable for some jobs, then unacceptable, and then acceptable? Not exactly. In fact, it gets confusing in a hurry.

If Jesus were here today He'd be able to join the military, but he couldn't process your passport application. He could be a dogcatcher, but not the guy making you take off your shoes at the airport. He could be Secretary of State, but not the Vice President or the President, but He could be, apparently, the President's boss. (It might even be a requirement that the President report to a foreigner: most Americans say they wouldn't vote for an atheist. And the last President was pretty clear that he reported to Jesus, even if it seemed to many of us that it was really Dick Cheney.)

All I know is that the next time you people have an election, then for Christ's sake you'd better have your paperwork in order.

I probably should stop calling it "the local fishwrap." I wouldn't dream of wrapping fish in it.

Like many other newspapers' websites, my town's local fishwrap, Wheeling's Intelligencer & News-Register, allows its readers to comment on many articles on its website. The site's Terms of Service say that the comment feature is “provided to give users an interesting and stimulating forum to express their opinions and share ideas and information.”

“It is a condition of your use of these Services,” say the Terms, that people don't, among other things, use “vulgar, profane, abusive, hateful or racist language or expressions” or make “attacks of a personal, racial or religious nature” or “post any material that is threatening, false, defamatory, misleading, fraudulent, unfair, and inaccurate... [or] is unreasonably harmful or offensive to any individual, community, association, business or group.”

It's a system that works, except when it doesn't, which is usually. You know that old saying that opinions are like assholes – everybody's got one? The News-Register's comments section seems to be on a single-minded quest to tip that balance. Now, a lot of news (and other) websites have comments sections that seem to be populated mostly by people who have checked their good manners at the door. But the News-Register's comments are different. The comments on nearly every story seem to rapidly and rabidly devolve into demonstrations of who can be the most puerile and juvenile. How juvenile, you ask?

Well, here's user “EllisWyatt” implying that “GymJones” is a homosexual voyeur in response to GymJones calling him gay and “a little whiny c-u-n-t” (the hyphens are there to defeat the Dirty Word Filter) during an interesting and stimulating discussion of some local steelworkers being recalled from layoffs.



Elsewhere, “AlexanderShulgin” adds a non-journalist's perspective to a story about poor weather during the local Jamboree In The Hills music festival: “Tit bit nipply,” he remarks, expanding upon his own earlier comment - “Let’s see some t i t i e s [sic]” - on another story about the Jamboree.


“WVUGator2” agrees with EllisWyatt that a fire at a local country club “is a classic example of Jewish Lighning [sic],” - arson as an implement of insurance fraud - in part because “we all know Moondog could not get his bike up Route 88.” Moondog, a bit of a local celebrity, is known for riding a bicycle that flies a very large flag. Were it not for the difficulty in riding that bike up the very steep hill, Moondog, an African-American, would seem to be high on WVUGator2's list of suspects.



On the healthcare issue, “conservsquatch” says GymJones is both incestuous and a pedophile: “Gymjones does his mother. He also still touches little boys,” while “Truthseeker” believes many of the commenters “enjoy kicking puppies and kittens.”



Commenting on another healthcare story, “Highland” postulated that “[President] Obama will shut down any hospital that refuses to perform abortions,” prompting “acousticportal” to riposte in customary fashion, “Highland...are you really that ignorant? f-n blind follower.”

When a nearby school board announced the appointment of a principal to a new position after allegations of harrassment had been made against him, EllisWyatt suggested that county voters were “morons,” prompting shastacooper to call him “truly, truly the VILLAGE IDIOT.” Then, when “All4One” lamented the lack of civility in the comments to that point, COACH1 seemed to imply that All4One was a corrupt crony of the former principal, which in turn prompted Honeybun to speculate that COACH1 “may have been getting some special favors from” said former principal.

So, the News-Register's comment pages are home to a pretty sad-sack bunch of intemperate, insulting, homophobic, vitriolic, foul-mouthed, xenophobic, intolerant, petty, vindictive, rude and libelous people, and the Wheeling Intelligencer & News-Register seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Maybe its editors just have a different definition of “an interesting and stimulating forum.”

byoolin's got a brand new trebuchet.

I'm moving my stuff here from the old place. There will be a short period of adjustment as I attempt to figure out why the "import XML" function seems to be hanging.

Restez-vous tranquille.

In the meantime, please enjoy one of my recent photographs: Great White Egrets on a pier near Pawleys Island, South Carolina.



(Click on the image to launch a larger version in a new window.)