dating tip for women

The prettiest dress in your closet is always the first one.

Oh Danny Boy

Via the Drudge Report, Dan Rather admits he is a dangerous reporter:

In my heart, my marrow, I am a reporter. And one who doesn't play it safe.

He also says:

I believe in the dream, the magical mystical kingdom of CBS News. It may exist only in our minds, but that makes it no less real.

He then produces documents personally typed by the Easter Bunny, which cast doubt upon Karl Rove's attendance record as an ROTC student at Halliburton Junior High School in Camelot, Alaska.

Eminent Domain Abuse

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut regarding the abuse of eminent domain laws.

A Google News search shows several references to the case. Some of these cases are stronger than others. but it should be obvious that individual property rights need to be more vigorously defended, especially from greed-driven projects.

This page has one of the best summaries:

We have nothing against large corporations and wealthy developers, but they should get property the old-fashioned American way: through negotiating with willing sellers, rather than by convincing cities to use their police powers to take property from those who don’t want to sell it. We hope the Supreme Court puts the brakes on this abusive practice.

Maybe it should be decreed that the profits of any new development must be shared in perpetuity with those who were forced to leave?

Terry Schiavo Update

Via Blue Goldfish, LaShawn Barber says:

Liberals will hold vigils for murderous thugs on death row, thugs who are receiving the due penalty of their errors, but when an INNOCENT brain-damaged woman whose husband has two kids with another woman and may have put her in this state is facing death by starvation, they’ve got nothing to say. The greatest cause is protecting INNOCENT human life. Where are the feminists? Where are the Mumia Abu-Jamal clowns? (Visit the site of slain Officer Daniel Faulkner to clear the stench.)

shoulda linked to this earlier...

Just click right here
and you'll hear a tale,
the tale of a real long flight.

That started down
in Florida
aboard this pretty kite.

sensible nonsense

No Oil For Pacifists has a list of nonsense up with which he will not put!

surrealist update

the black dog has really been barking at the skylights lately, but at least there are no sentient donuts stalking my cat...

UPDATE: Lileks kicked out his black dog today.

Not bad for a quagmire.

In case you missed the headlines, Banner of Liberty has this Iraq update.

funny stuff

Viewpoint has a great punchline.

Rightwing Duck has no proof.

Lileks' mistake

As much as I like practically everything James Lileks writes (Bleats, Backfence, Newhouse, Joe Ohio, the list goes on...), he's mistaken in thinking that facts point to evolution. He makes a good conclusion, however, that "we could avoid conflict if teachers felt free to lead the class in philosophical speculations". That's all that we are asking for in the first place - the right to discuss rational alternatives to the cult of Darwinism.

UPDATE: Proverbs Daily says the debate is important.

random roundup

better late than never...?

Extreme Space Suits

Abbott and Costello Shop For Computers

Iowahawk manages to insult everyone (profanity)

Douglas Adams' Asteroid

(for an extremely limited audience - you know who you are:) The Start and End of US385. Apparently, I'm "into subtlety"...

Terri's Fight

In case you haven't followed any other links in the Terry Schiavo case, go read these two at TerrisFight.org:

The Timeline

Myth vs Fact

Also, it looks like anyone instrumental in removing the feeding tube would be breaking the law:

825.102 Abuse, aggravated abuse, and neglect of an elderly person or disabled adult; penalties.--

(1) "Abuse of an elderly person or disabled adult" means:

(a) Intentional infliction of physical or psychological injury upon an elderly person or disabled adult;

(b) An intentional act that could reasonably be expected to result in physical or psychological injury to an elderly person or disabled adult; or

(c) Active encouragement of any person to commit an act that results or could reasonably be expected to result in physical or psychological injury to an elderly person or disabled adult

...

(3)(a) "Neglect of an elderly person or disabled adult" means:

1. A caregiver's failure or omission to provide an elderly person or disabled adult with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the elderly person's or disabled adult's physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition, clothing, shelter, supervision, medicine, and medical services that a prudent person would consider essential for the well-being of the elderly person or disabled adult; or

2. A caregiver's failure to make a reasonable effort to protect an elderly person or disabled adult from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.

Neglect of an elderly person or disabled adult may be based on repeated conduct or on a single incident or omission that results in, or could reasonably be expected to result in, serious physical or psychological injury, or a substantial risk of death, to an elderly person or disabled adult.

(b) A person who willfully or by culpable negligence neglects an elderly person or disabled adult and in so doing causes great bodily harm, permanent disability, or permanent disfigurement to the elderly person or disabled adult commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084...

...and violating her rights:

744.3215 Rights of persons determined incapacitated.--

(1) A person who has been determined to be incapacitated retains the right:

(a) To have an annual review of the guardianship report and plan.

(b) To have continuing review of the need for restriction of his or her rights.

(c) To be restored to capacity at the earliest possible time.

(d) To be treated humanely, with dignity and respect, and to be protected against abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

(e) To have a qualified guardian.

(f) To remain as independent as possible, including having his or her preference as to place and standard of living honored, either as he or she expressed or demonstrated his or her preference prior to the determination of his or her incapacity or as he or she currently expresses his or her preference, insofar as such request is reasonable.

(g) To be properly educated.

(h) To receive prudent financial management for his or her property and to be informed how his or her property is being managed, if he or she has lost the right to manage property.

(i) To receive necessary services and rehabilitation.

(j) To be free from discrimination because of his or her incapacity.

(k) To have access to the courts.

(l) To counsel.

(m) To receive visitors and communicate with others.

(n) To notice of all proceedings related to determination of capacity and guardianship, unless the court finds the incapacitated person lacks the ability to comprehend the notice.

(o) To privacy.

oh no

Loonatics must be running WB these days - they're "re-imagining" the classic characters of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, et al.

The truth behind the quote is: “We've all gone insane. Wow, what a horrible way to take the classic Looney Tunes franchise and stomp it into the mud. If anything, it’s a destruction of the legacy instead of an homage.”

---

p.s. This is obviously very unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but still...

looking forward to baseball?

Why Is Baseball So Much Better Than Football? by Thomas Boswell (1987)

FrankJ, the new EvilGlenn

Oh the humanity... er, the, um... bloganity of it all!

Looks like FrankJ has surpassed EvilGlenn on the evilosity scale. It's one thing to be a puppy blender, but FrankJ is now blending ducks, rabbits, monkeys, parrots, and gun-toting couples! Sick! (Look out iowahawk, you may be next.)

The chicken-fried alligator strips should have been a warning sign.

FrankJ, Zooblender.

Indeed.

Finally!

Updated HIH Free Desktop Wallpaper Image page, with two new designs.

go read...

The American Thinker skewers several left-wing dogmas in one post.

Viewpoint comments on Dennis Prager's five-part case for Judeo-Christian Values.

Vitamin Ban?

In the interest of "public health", EU to Ban 300 Vitamin & Mineral Supplements. Yet somehow, tobacco, alcohol, and escargot remain legal...

Mars

Scientists have found life on Mars!

The giveaway was high localized concentrations of methane. At first the scientists suspected a “chemical bioreactor in the subsurface – an underground microbial ecosystem of sorts" - such as they had previously found at Rio Tinto.

Turns out that the methane source was only Bin Laden.

scandal, scandal, who's got the scandal?

Rathergate: the gift that keeps on giving. C-BS scapegoats are no longer cooperating.

KofiPot Dome: No Oil for Pacifists has a roundup.

Opengates: Michelle Malkin's latest so far.

Easongate: One roundup at the Captain's Quarters.

UPGATE, er... I mean UPDATE: Mark Steyn on a scandal that should not be reduced to a catchy-gate name.

go read

Blogging for Terry Schiavo - LaShawn Barber has a roundup.

Some of the hippopotamus are two-sided squares... or something like that.

MishMash found some cool origami.

rock paper scissors

kinda cool, kinda weird

geek valentine

roses are #FF0000,
violets are #0000FF,
all my base are
belong to you.

- author unknown

fun at omniglot

"useful phrases"

"tongue twisters"

"my hovercraft is full of eels"

is micro$oft dying?

Let's hope...

quote from the third page:

But when was the last time you thought about Microsoft, except in frustration or anger?

NEVER!

promised land

After a few millenia, the walls of Jericho have been rebuilt, a stunning reversal of the Israeli victory led by Joshua. Reliable sources state that this is only a temporary setback.

Missing Los Alamos hard drives

Turns out the missing hard drives never existed...

The U.S. Energy Department admitted late Friday that two allegedly "missing" secret computer disks that had triggered a major purge at one of the nation's premier nuclear weapons laboratories never existed in the first place.

But Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the University of California that manages Los Alamos National Laboratory Latest News about Los Alamos National Laboratory will see its fiscal 2004 fee reduced by 5.8 million dollars as punishment for security Latest News about Security lapses discovered at the northern New Mexico facility that gave birth to the U.S. nuclear bomb.

"Although multiple investigations have confirmed that the 'missing' disks never existed, the major weaknesses in controlling classified material revealed by this incident are absolutely unacceptable, and the University of California must be held accountable for them," Brooks said in a statement.

And in related news, millions of traffic tickets will be sent out because drivers had the opportunity to speed, and thousands will be imprisoned for life because they might have shot someone, and "they must be held accountable for that..."

21st Century Reformation?

Blue Goldfish is on a roll against the problem of church-as-entertainment and related issues. Go read these three...

the sabbath day

the fruit of yesteryear

how, then, shall we worship?

...and keep checking in there - i suspect he has more to say on the matter.

wow

is this for real? printed skin...

Ben Stein's next to last post

I found this Ben Stein article just after I found the other one I just posted. I won't post the whole thing this time - just this top 20 list:

1. I am powerless over other people's anger and envy.
2. I have all the strength I need when I turn all of my problems over to God.
3. My life here and everywhere is unmanageable by me. But it is child's play to God.
4. One day at a time is the answer to everything.
5. There is only one real wealth: peace of mind.
6. My greatest power comes from my surrender to God's will every moment of every day.
7. Fear is the common human condition. The only solution that lasts is faith in God.
8. What happens to me is not terribly important.
9. I cannot control other people, and when I try, it leads to disaster.
10. Acceptance of God's will is my only option today. It is not a choice but a necessity.
11. The problem in our lives is powerlessness. The solution is also powerlessness.
12. What is health? Put your trust in God and go on with your day's work.
13. Self-pity is prison: I want out.
14. Envy is as bad for me as strychnine. I won't drink any of it.
15. My job today is to do a bit of work and stay calm and not hurt anyone, including myself. That's it.
16. Today, I am not going to judge. Not even myself.
17. Today, I will stay away from people who are foreseeably harmful.
18. Instead of trying to figure out the universe, I will think about what I am going to have for lunch.
19. I am not the director of the movie of my life. That is a far greater power than I will ever be.
20. What happens to me today is what is happening to one of eight billion people on this earth. That should give me an idea of how important I am.

newest scrappleface...

So the DNC is a protection racket? Sounds about right...

Ben Stein is a Star

...by realizing who the real stars are. copied in its entirety, in case it disappears...

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
by Ben Stein

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to do it maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights.

He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

As so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. But I think the best guidance I ever got was from the inauguration speech of Democrat John F. Kennedy in January of 1961.

On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth...asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, God's work must surely be our own."

And then to paraphrase my favorite president, my boss and friend Richard Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a few feet away, "This is not goodbye. The French have a word for it--au revoir. We'll see you again."

Au revoir, and thank you for reading me for so long. God bless every one of you. We'll see you again.

Desktop Design Update

In case you haven't noticed, I've not been adding new free Hatless in Hattiesburg desktop designs as I had planned to this year. The main reason is that I now plan to offer poster-sized prints of similar designs for sale, and have been focusing my efforts there. I will try to have at least two new desktop designs uploaded by the end of the month...

I will also post small samples of the poster designs when they are ready, in case anyone is interested in purchasing the prints.

go read...

Mark Steyn on the UN-government. One of many good quotes:

One of the reasons I'm in favour of small government is because big government tends to be remote government, and remote government is unaccountable, and, as a wannabe world government, the UN is the remotest and most unaccountable of all. If the sentimental utopian blather ever came true and we wound up with one "world government", from an accounting department point of view, the model will be Nigeria rather than New Hampshire.

RTWT.

ha-HA!

Search for squirrel kung fu yield 30 hits at The Onion! Even technophobe make better search - ha-HA!

Go Read...

Blue Goldfish on the 'intellect' of jihadists.

Eidos on gay marriage.

LaShawn Barber on Sullivan-scam.

Practical Penumbra on the follies playing at the theatre. And you thought you had problems at work...

Bad Example of a bad film.

Hugh Hewitt on Mattis v Jordan. Can't find the link, so I'll copy-paste Update 3 here:

Type "Mattis" into the search engines of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times and you will find stories here, here, here, and here on United States Marine Corps General James Mattis' remarks on war fighting made this past Tuesday.

Type "Eason Jordan" into those same search engines and you will get nothing concerning Jordan's scandalous accusation at Davos on January 27 that the American military "targeted" and killed a dozen journalists in Iraq. Zip. Nothing.

The elite media instantly saddles up to ride to the condemnation of a speech given by a warrior much beloved and respected by his troops --a genuine hero and charismatic war-winner who believes in closing with and killing the enemy before they kill his troops and more civilians, and for whose ideology of fascism he has complete contempt.

But let the speech be given by a MSM big, and let the subject be a slander on the entire American military, and the result is total MSM silence.

windoze maintenance

highly recommended and appropriate debugging method...

word survey

How do people in your area typically pronounce these two words?:

OIL:
1 syllable, like 'awl' or 'oll',
2 syllables, like 'aw-ull' or 'oh-ill',
or 3 syllables, like 'aw-ee-ull' or 'oh-ee-ull'?

CRAYONS:
1 syllable, 'krahnz',
2 syllables, 'kray-onz',
or do they call them 'crayolas' or 'colors'?

Which term do people in your area prefer for each of these items?:

wide piece of furniture:
SOFA,
COUCH,
DIVAN,
or something else?

cold storage unit:
FRIDGE,
REFRIGERATOR,
FRIGDAIRE,
ICEBOX,
or something else?

carbonated beverage:
SODA,
POP,
SODA POP,
COKE,
COLA,
or something else?

i forgot...

...that if anyone asks how you are doing, the last thing they want to know is how you are doing.

book market

If you thought Hewitt's and Lileks' books did well, just wait 'til you see how well this one sells! Yes, FrankJ, there is a market - but don't quote me on that... ;)