Category: Uncategorized

In theory, I’m glad that this line of books exists. I’ll have to delve into it at some point, maybe starting with the book on Sign ‘O’ The Times.

Under regular circumstances, I’d have made a Diego Maradona joke about this story. But I think he’s still in the hospital with all sorts of heart trouble, so it wouldn’t be nice.

Maybe I’ve been too tough on the French & the Russians. Here’s a story about Marat Safin at the French Open:

Safin was still annoyed about being penalized a point for dropping his shorts early in the fifth set Thursday.

“I felt it was a great point for me,” the former U.S. Open champion said. “I felt like pulling my pants down. What’s bad about it?”

To celebrate a drop shot he hit for a winner, Safin grabbed his shorts, pulled them down to his thighs and leaned over. The crowd cheered and laughed.

“Nobody complained,” Safin said. “Everybody was OK. It wasn’t like really bad.”

There’s also a pretty interesting article about the two faces of Vladimir Putin in this week’s BusinessWeek. I’d link to it, but it’s premium content and you need to be registered.

Over on Drudge today, an entry reads Archives: Tape shows Nixon too drunk to speak to British PM….

It details a story that, during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, President Nixon was too drunk to have a phone conversation with the British prime minister. But that sentence isn’t necessarily accurate. I guess I’m too nitpicky about language, but the article shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told assistant Brent Scowcroft that Nixon was too drunk for the conversation. There is no tape that “shows Nixon too drunk.” There’s only the word of Henry Kissinger in a phone transcript.

And I’m just saying that Henry might not be the most reliable or accurate source, especially when it came to getting access to the president during a crisis.

I laughed like a retard over this request for a better war sim. Particularly the part about the tentacles. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago, following the execution of Nicholas Berg, I noted that even Hezbollah condemned the action. VM reader “Andrew” evidently took umbrage at this remark. In the Comments section of my site, he provided a link to an article on Hezbollah in the New York Review of Books and wrote:

A nice cure for those of us without a nuanced view of history, recent or otherwise. But when it comes to Islam, what’s easier than lumping them all into a nice little undiferentiated ball?

It’s so much easier to call out your targets that way.

I guess his point was that Hezbollah is a standard political party, and does plenty of good for its constituents.

So it must hearten him that this guy is trying to extend the reach of Hezbollah’s humanitarian activities.

In Athens.

By sending night-vision equipment.

For your enjoyment (even though this has probably circulated all over the Internet and I’m the last guy it got to), Redneck Haiku:

BEAUTY
Naked in repose
Silvery silhouette girls
Adorn my mudflaps

REMORSE
A painful sadness
Can’t fit big screen TV through
Double-wide’s front door

OPTIONS
Unemployment’s out.
Hey, maybe I can get on
Disability

BLAZE
Distant siren screams
Dumb-ass Verne’s been playing with
Gasoline again

A NEW MOON
Flashlights pierce darkness
No nightcrawlers to be found
Guess we’ll gig some frogs

EXUBERANCE
Joyous, playful, bright
Trailer park girl rolls in puddle
Of old motor oil

ALONE
Seeking solitude
Carl’s ex-wife Tammy files for
Restraining order

DESIRE
Damn, in that tube-top
You make me almost forget
That you are my cousin

HATRED
I curse the rainbow
Emblazoned upon his hood
God damn Jeff Gordon

OFFERINGS
Tonight we hunger
Grandma sent grocery money
To Jimmy Swaggert

DRAMA
Set the VCR
Dukes of Hazzard Marathon
At 9 O’Clock

DEPRIVED
In WalMart toy aisle
Wailing boy wants wrestling doll
Mama whups his ass

NO SIGNAL
White noise, buzzing static
Call Earl; satellite dish
needs new descrambler

IMPOUNDED
Sixty-five dollars
And cyclone fence keeps me from
My El Camino

GATHERING
In early morning mist
Mama searches Circle K for
Moon Pies and Red Man

PRIDE
Grinning, he displays
The nine hundred beer cans
Filling pickup bed

Evidently, Bill Cosby’s got some strong opinions on lower-class black families. According to the Washington Post, Cosby unloaded at a recent event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed.:

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English,” he exclaimed. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!”

There’s more. Scroll down from here.

Update: Cosby defends statements that he really shouldn’t have to waste his time defending, in the New York Times.

The new public library building in Seattle just opened. Designed by Rem Koolhaas, it’s drawn rave reviews, including this one from Herbert Muschamp at the NYTimes (you have to be registered to read it, I tihnk). It includes the priceless line:

“[W]hat kind of adult would deprive a child of the memory of a spectacular encounter with space?”

Last night, I started reading Underground, Haruki Murakami’s collection of interviews of survivors of the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.

Today, we find out that there was sarin nerve gas in an roadside bomb/unexploded shell in Iraq.

Just plain weird, is what I’m saying.