Posted 1:28 PM by Floyd

Burninating the countryside! TROGDOR!!!

Posted 5:15 PM by Floyd

Yay! Gregg Easterbrook says Tuesday Morning Quarterback will return soon. You can satisfy your TMQ cravings by reading this TMQ pastiche at Football Outsiders.

'Tis Better to Have Rushed and Lost Than Never to Have Rushed at All: While playing Jersey/B and leading 17 to 16 early in the 4th quarter, the Vikings face 3rd and 4 on Jersey/B's 33-yard line, the area of the field where logic dictates going for it on 4th down, do the Vikings pound, pound the ball? No! Vikings line up in shotgun formation. Result - incompletion, penalty, punt. Vikings give up two 4th quarter touchdowns and lose. (Raliegh Grantham, Ashland, OR)

Posted 12:04 PM by Floyd

Sherry and I had planned to visit the freak show that is Halloween in the Castro, and then go to a friend's party. But the weather may not cooperate; it is cold and showers are forecast. So we may have to hang out indoors with our friends. I would hate to miss this event. I went several years ago and fondly remember these costumes:

• The purple Tinky Winky, which as we all know was declared gay by Jerry Falwell.
  
• Two girls dressed as Steve Young and Troy Aikman, bound together with a chain and flagellating each other. These people were relatively normal.
  
• Half a dozen mustachio'd men with blonde wigs wearing gold dresses, who would swoop onto some innocent bystander and sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President".
  

By the way, if you looked at that "Halloween in the Castro" web page and thought "what a hot looking cop chick," you should stay away from this event for your own safety.

Posted 11:01 AM by Floyd

It's time for the Mercury News to lecture us awful people about gun control! (But there's no such thing as liberal media bias.)

For novelist Richard North Patterson, a nation's empathy -- its capacity to feel another's experience as evidenced in its laws and culture -- is a measure of its humanity and sanity.

By this measure, Patterson says, the United States ``suffers from a failure of empathy'' by failing to enact laws protecting victims of gun violence.

The US also suffers from a failure of empathy by failing to enact laws prohibiting fires.

``Since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963,'' he says, ``more Americans have been killed by guns than all the Americans lost in all the wars of the 20th century.''

But .. weren't a lot of the people killed in wars also killed by guns?

Maybe Patterson should go plead his case in Pyongyang.

Tonight, Patterson -- former trial lawyer and advocate for victims of domestic abuse -- brings the gun debate to downtown San Jose.

What a guy; he's an "advocate" for women who get beat up by men -- up until the point where an abused woman might want to defend herself with a gun. Oh well, at least he's empathetic.

Oh, and there is no liberal media bias.

His new political novel, ``Balance of Power,'' takes on the gun debate, as well.

The thriller is the last in his trilogy about Democrat Kerry Kilcannon, who lost his brother and almost his life to gun assailants. Now president, Kilcannon wants to end gun violence and to make Lara Costello, a Mexican-American journalist, first lady.

Returning to the Bay Area after the White House wedding, the Costello family -- Lara's mother, sister and little niece -- are gunned down at the San Francisco International Airport.

The killer is the murdered sister's abusive husband, who buys the assault weapon without a background check at a gun show. He also buys especially lethal bullets, capable of clawing apart human organs and slicing the hands of emergency-room surgeons.

I hate those especially lethal bullets. They're killing people even after the victims are dead! I prefer to be shot by moderately lethal bullets.

If only guns were against the law. No one who would murder three people would even think of breaking the law by acquiring a gun!

The plot parallels real-life figures and tragedies, says Patterson, 56, who has homes on Martha's Vineyard and in San Francisco.

Who would know more about real life than a limousine liberal from Martha's Vineyard!

...

A board member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Patterson says he distinguishes between unlawful gun purchases and legal gun-ownership with background checks.

Oh, so Patterson is not just some concerned nut. He's an anti-gun activist.

Just remember, there is no liberal media bias.

Posted 10:25 AM by Floyd

Malaysian Prime Minister Muthahir knows how to protect himself from Zionists. Though you have to wonder if he worries about Jewish control of the aluminum industry ...

Posted 3:39 PM by Floyd

Infinite Monkey David Ben blogs from the inferno:

In my last dispatch, I reflected that maybe it would have been a good idea to clear the dry brush from our backyard before the outbreak of the largest wildfire in California history. Woulda coulda shoulda. Too late.

...

The wind shifted. Hard. I kept looking out my front window every ten minutes or so. The smoke was getting thicker. Was it getting hotter? My neighbor across the street thought so. About 10 minutes to 3:00, I went into my next door neighbor's backyard. Their wall is adjacent to the main boulevard that runs to our neighborhood, across from which a 20-foot-high wall of flame, driven by extremely hard Santana winds, moved quickly through the open, brush-filled field. The fire was maybe 15 feet from the road.

...

(Update: A week later I revisited this post and found that it was Ben who posted, not David. My apologies to Ben, David, RobbL, and that monkey in the zoo I made fun of when I was six years old.)

Posted 4:37 PM by Floyd

Here's the start of a blog post from Gregg Easterbrook:

I'd like to propose a simplification of the entire Iraq/WMD debate. It's this: If the reason we went into Iraq really, truly was that the Bush administration really, truly believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, then there is nothing of which the administration need feel shamed --but the United States must immediately leave Iraq.

Infinite Monkey David called this "nonsense" and said "Gregg Easterbrook has lost his mind". I wouldn't go that far, but Easterbrook does come across as an earnest 12-year-old who says things like "Let's make it against the law for people to violate the law!"

I also found interesting an earlier posting, in which Easterbrook mocked Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart further determined that it will still sell the leading women's mags--like Cosmo, Glamour, Marie Claire, and Redbook--but will shield their covers. Why? Because the women's mags increasingly highlight articles about hot sex: which, it appears, women like. Set aside the classic male/female split, that men want to look at pictures while women want to read about sex. Just consider that the women's mags would not be increasingly featuring writing about hot sex unless focus-group studies showed this is what female readers are interested in.

At the end of his post Easterbrook toed the liberal party line on beauty:

Sidelight: Easterblogg's friend Donna Fenn wrote a devastating article 20 years ago, for The Washington Monthly, about how women's mags hold their readership by endlessly, subtly suggesting that no matter how stylish, smart and kissable a woman becomes, it's just never quite enough. The headline: "NINETY-NINE WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR INSECURITY!"

But Gregg, women's mags would not be increasingly featuring writing about women's insecurities unless focus-group studies showed this is what female readers are interested in...

Posted 2:25 PM by Floyd

You can often find conspiracy theory buffs in any paper's letters to the editor. Today's San Jose Mercury News contains such a letter -- though with an unusual pedigree.

In a recent meeting with state superintendents, a federal official representing Education Secretary Rod Paige labeled the concerns of state educators about the No Child Left Behind Act as ``bogeymen.'' This communicated the Bush administration's determination to punish schools not meeting the absurdly unrealistic standards set by Washington bureaucrats.

Most administrators, teachers and board members endorse accountability and high standards. The No Child Left Behind Act, however, is less a plan about accountability than a plot to undercut public education by hammering the most impoverished schools with the blunt instrument of standardized test scores. It also remains pathetically under-funded.

A Gallup Poll revealed that the average citizen knows little about No Child Left Behind. While the spotlight is focused on the war on terrorism, the fight to strengthen public education often feels like a losing battle. Our students and teachers deserve an education policy that seeks to improve teaching and learning, not a political assault.

And who penned this paranoid missive? Get your eyebrows ready for raising:

Steve Rowley
Superintendent, Fremont Union High School District

All I know about Fremont High School is what I learned from James Donald:

Certain government
owned schools, for example fremont high in california, are
rather famous for not making the attempt, depressing housing
prices in the district, and causing parents to launch all sorts
of scams to get their children into some other district. My
impression is that any kid in fremont who actualy goes to
fremont high has neglectful parents or a disfunctional family
-- that normal healthy families will do what is necessary to
send their children somewhere else.