Sunday, May 30, 2004

WE'RE NOT WORTHY! Two lizardoids, myself and a cohort, met the Lizard Master, Charles Johnson, face to face, at my old alma mater, the American Film Institute. His Evilness described his evolution from a blong about web page design to the leading pro-American, pro-Israel, "anti-idiotarian" blog in existence, but he wouldn't tell us what Little Green Footballs actually means.

Much or the crowd was rightwing or conservative. Yours truly is neither, but shares the common distrust of dictatorships.

BTW, anyone agree that Bush blinked on Iraq?

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

LA TIMES WATCH: Miracles of miracles, while I was hunkered down trying to earn a living, the Whale's chief Editorial Page blow-hard Janet Clayton was demoted to editor of California regional news, and guess who they hired to take her place? (No, not me, although I so clearly deserve it.)
Michael Kinsley
Yep, THE Michael Kinsley, formerly of The New Republic and Crossfire. And he is NOT a terrorist apologist, or at least he wasn't at his previous jobs. Perhaps the heat reached the gnomes running the Tribune Company -- people don't like daily doses of radical propaganda with their morning coffee.

Think maybe he'll deep six Robert Scheer? Make the narcissistic bastard work for a living? And how long will Managing Editor John Carroll let him stay?

Your guess is as good as mine...


WHEW! Sorry I haven't been posting, but I had a really, really, big writing assignment, and I just submitted a HUGE mother of a story, over 3,345 words. And no, I can't post it -- my editor would be furious.

During the writing, I got a free dinner for myself and my family. That's the good part of being a feature writer. The bad part is that a freebie is the only way you can get a great dinner for yourself and your family!

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

THANKS, BLOGGER! Damned new Blogspot software just ate my last post. It completely disappeared. Let's see if I can remember any of it... By the way, Blogger's spell checker doesn't like the word blogging. It wants users to change the word to flogging. Reminds me of what I would like to do to a certain fish-lipped sociopath holed up in Ramallah. But, damn it, he would probably enjoy it...

FEEDBACK LOOP: It's a bit painful to make these entries if no one reads them, but I shall forbear, if not every day. My writing career seems to have moved into second gear, which makes blogging a bit of a chore. Come on people, let me know how horrible my rants are!

SEE, THE FENCE WORKS: Check Josh Harvey's chart demonstrating the rise in attempted suicide bombings and the decline in actual bombings carried out. The overwhelming majority are thwarted...

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Let's finally make an end of them: Has anyone not seen the jolly gentlemen of Hamas and their collection of human meat?

I hate to admit it, but I once supported Oslo. Now I say, "Loose the Kraken." (An obscure mythology reference, to be sure, but you can imagine what it means.)

My immediate -- real -- suggestion is to take Gaza section by section and put the entire population through an explosive detector. Give those who test positive one chance -- talk and live (albeit after a good swallow of pig fat), or shout allah akhbar, just once. Aim low, mix the carcass with pig manure, burn it with the others, and inject the ashes into the water supply.

Ok, I'm just a little angry right now. I take back the part of injecting the ashes into the water supply. But I'll add another -- Take their children and raise them as people.

Let's finally make an end of them: Has anyone not seen the jolly gentlemen of Hamas and their collection of human meat?

I hate to admit it, but I once supported Oslo. Now I say, "Loose the Kraken." (An obscure mythology reference, to be sure, but you can imagine what it means.)

My immediate -- real -- suggestion is to take Gaza section by section and put the entire population through an explosive detector. Give those who test positive one chance -- talk and live (albeit after a good swallow of pig fat), or shout allah akhbar, just once. Aim low, mix the carcass with pig manure, burn it with the others, and inject the ashes into the water supply.

Ok, I'm just a little angry right now. I take back the part of injecting the ashes into the water supply. But I'll add another -- Take their children and raise them as people.

Death Watch: Notice that the networks and the papers didn't show what happened to Mr. Nick Berg. All that happened to him was that some dark age bastards cut his head off with a knife. But a bunch of naked Baathists get some noogies and wedgies and HEAVENS! Spread it all over the papers, day after day. None of them were shot, hanged, stabbed, beheaded, or faced watching their children raped.

Cox and Forkum had this to say about that...

And one wonders what sort of clucking is going to come from Amnesty International? (They once called me from Europe, when I was a newspaper editor to complain that some murderer was about to be executed for murder. I asked the numnuck "You are telling me that he didn't do it?" The reply, "That isn't the point!" No it was the point. A murderer is a murderer.)

Monday, May 10, 2004

Blog Watch: Blogger has a new user interface. All beige instead of grey, with a black quote feature like Little Green Footballs.

Does it work?
Let's see...

It does, sorta, but in fact, it is a pain because you can't go straight back after previewing. Grrrrrrrrrr. Oh, "Hide Preview" does it. That was slightly un-intuitive.

And the blockquote thing has a flaw -- it inserts two new lines at the end, so you have to continue from the same paragraph or you'll look funny. Oh well, It's a work in progress.

Oh, and the spellcheck is REALLY dumb -- it doesn't even know the word "Blogger"! HA-HA!

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Health Watch: It was a false alarm, thank G-d. I'll tell you about it someday. Ok, I had a lump and the doctor urged a mammogram. Guys can get it. Damn that X-ray machine was cold, but it turned out to be just a stupid cyst.

The ladies who march with pink ribbons don't bother to tell you about it, but perhaps two percent of all B cancers occur in men. Get examed, even if you're a guy. (I confess, though, for a few hours after the exam I had unnatural urges to pout, look at fabrics, and win every single argument, but they wore off.)

: - ))

A Wonder From Irshad: Irshad Manji of Toronto, author of "The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change" is our favorite Muslim-Lesbian writer and thinker (that's a lot to combine). The self-styled "Muslim Refusenik" believes that Muslims need a reality check:

Moderate Christians accept that the Bible is a compendium of gospels "according to" different observers - Matthew, Luke and so forth. 'According to' means as interpreted by them. But no such acknowledgment exists in Islam yet. Even moderate Muslims believe that the Koran is the final, immutable word of God, untouched by the human hand and mind. Which is why most Muslims have no clue how to debate or dissent with extremists - we've never been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about our holy book. It's time to change that...

She also takes issue in Toronto Life with Yosi Klein Halevy, one of our favorite writers, who implied that Islamic fatalism is a good thing:

It was Halevi who urged her to inject more love into her narrative, "not for the mullahs but for the billions of souls over the centuries who prostrated on little embroidered prayer rugs and offered their small, unhappy lives to God’s glory..." "Excuse me for ruining the moment," Irshad bounced back, "but why should so many lives be 'small' and 'unhappy,'especially under a merciful God?" She has little patience for Westerners willing to tolerate human rights violations in the Muslim world. She calls it "the soft racism of low expectations."

Halevy wrote the following of his encounter with Irshad:

Irshad is particularly outraged at Arab - and, by extension, Muslim - hatred of Israel. She understands what most of the world does not: that the Arab world's antipathy toward Israel is a monstrous attempt to deflect onto the Jewish state the terrible failure of its own civilization. And she has taken the time to examine all the little lies that together form the new big lie: that the Arab world is the innocent victim of a rapacious Israel.


Monday, May 03, 2004

Arab Heroism Watch: A couple of Palestinian Heroes murdered a pregnant woman and her four daughters.

Naturally, al-jezeera called it a "resistance strike." This is how these gentlemen of the Arabic press described the Israeli response:

The missile attack was a collective punishment for an earlier Palestinian shooting of illegal Israeli settlers on their way to protest any withdrawal.

A woman and her four daughters, shot at close range, in their car, and it's a "resistance strike." (And the rally against withdrawal was long over, but that makes it ok, right?)

Animals.
Health Watch: Should anyone be reading this, I've been having some medical tests done, so there hasn't been much time or attention span for blogging. I'll explain when I know more.