Category: Uncategorized

Last week: 12-2. Season: 77-39, .664. Fantasy 6-2.

W-Jacksonville Jaguars over Houston Texans
W-Seattle Seahawks over Arizona Cardinals
W-New York Giants over San Francisco 49ers
W-San Diego Chargers over New York Jets
W-Carolina Panthers over Tampa Bay Buccaneers
W-Cincinnati Bengals over Baltimore Ravens
L-Oakland Raiders over Kansas City Chiefs
W-Washington Redskins over Philadelphia Eagles
W-Minnesota Vikings over Detroit Lions
W-Chicago Bears over New Orleans Saints
W-Cleveland Browns over Tennessee Titans
L-Green Bay Packers over Pittsburgh Steelers
L-Miami Dolphins over Atlanta Falcons
New England Patriots over Indianapolis Colts

Don’t like this week, don’t like it at all. All the bad teams are at home, which can lead to some strange results. I’ll be delighted to go 10-4 this week.

Fresh from his stunningly accurate predictions of mass anti-semitic riots caused by Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, the ADL’s Abe Foxman declares war on Christianity and Christians:

Institutionalized Christianity in the U.S. has grown so extremist that it poses a tangible danger to the principle of separation of church and state and threatens to undermine the religious tolerance that characterizes the country, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, warned in his address to the League’s national commission, meeting in New York City over the weekend….The ADL, considered the largest Jewish organization in America, has in the past spearheaded campaigns against religious preachers and Christian elements deemed unusually extreme. But this is the first all-out media assault by an ADL head on the U.S. Christian establishment.

This guy would have made quite the grand strategist, wouldn’t he? With leaders such as these, it’s no wonder that Jews always manage to find persecution all over the world. Launching all-out assaults on the overwhelming majority doesn’t exactly strike me as the best way to win friends and influence people in any place or time.

Foxman’s strategy is intriguing. The Muslims already hate the Jews, the revolutionary pagans and secular atheists haven’t exactly shown a great deal of fondness for them in National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union or the post-christian EU, (do excuse that upper-case J, European readers) so naturally, attacking American Christians makes a great deal of sense. I suppose for his next trick, Mr. Foxman will travel to India to label Buddha a fat bastard and follow that up with an attack on Hindus – who, fortuitously enough, already have plenty of swastikas* on hand – thus assuring Mr. Foxman that everyone everywhere really is out to get him.

*yes, I know they’re reversed, don’t be so bloody pedantic.

2. Exploding gas tanks.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, I have actually set a car on fire and blown up a gas tank. It was when I was being chased by a pair of blonde, bisexual Estonian lady spies a few years back who were angry about having been seduced into blowing their cover during a torrid threesome the night before; the sun was rising and they thought they had me cornered with their Lotus Turbo Esprit when I fired an incindiary round from my laser-sighted Glock .40 that ignited the gas tank and sent up a massive fireball that was seen from Milwaukee.

Or perhaps I exaggerate somewhat. Running through my recall subroutines, I am informed that there was only one girl, and while she was blonde, she was perfectly straight and utterly devoid of any Estonian ancestry. There was no gun, no incindiary round, and the Lotus was actually a 1977 MGB. There was, however, an exploding gas tank. It seems what happened was that I missed a curve and drove off the road during one of the Jag club’s road rallies, and I did so at spectacularly bad time because the entire Midwest was going through a terrible drought that summer.

The non-Estonian non-spy and I thought it was pretty funny until we heard an ominous crackling sound beneath us. A quick glance underneath the car indicated that an overheated catalytic converter set the field on fire, and there was simply no way to drive the car forward or push it out of the ditch in which we were sitting. So, there was nothing to do but watch the car and the field burn; the gas tank explosion was disappointingly anticlimactic as there was just a dull poompf followed by a belching cloud of darker smoke rising from the back end of the car. Frankly, I felt rather cheated.

It took a lot longer than you’d think, too. I’d estimate that around seven or eight minutes of fairly comprehensive burning passed before the gas tank exploded. Ironically, MGB parts were rare enough that the various bits and pieces I managed to salvage from the burned-out hulk allowed me to pay for another MGB with a souped-up engine.

Kiwi starts a cute little blog:

I’ve been doing this for eight days, and already I can’t keep up with all the comments. I need minions like Vox Day has. Or maybe some ilk. Ilk would be nice. Voxie dear, do you have any spare ilk?

I’m not exactly sure why you’d want them. Their house-training is debatable, they’ll certainly drink all your liquor and somebody – I can only assume Nate – has a hole in their pocket and is leaving .45 hollow-points scattered all about the place. I just caught the Ridgeback chewing on one, that or she’s stocking up for the Great Canine Coup of 2005. Anyhow, I’m sure Chuck has plenty of comments to spare, so if you’d like a few dozen neatly formatted comments on the inevitable and unstoppable Uruguayan invasion of Marco Island, I’m sure he’d be happy to oblige.

And if he’s too busy, just mention the A-word, the E-word or the CW/WONA, you’ll soon have more ilk than you can shake a straw at.

Hello Kiwi is here, should you feel up to flexing your ilkdom. Warning: Cuteness and pinkness abounds.

JamieR keeps Nate up to date:

If you didn’t know (you most probably did), if Australia beats Uruguay on November 12 in Uruguay, we qualify for the World Cup. We always get the hard route, Oceania doesn’t get an automatic qualifier, and that usually means we have to face the South American team that finishes fifth, of all bloody regions! We almost had to play Brazil to qualify in 2002…

And sure, if we win on November 12, there’s another game in Sydney 4 days later, but that’s in the bag if we win in Montevideo. These are the same pricks that prevented us from qualifying for 2002 – with their home ground tactics of hiring mobs to spit on our players arriving at the airport, abusing them and trying to fight them, and forcing our team to stay holed up in their hotel rooms like prisoners, unable to do anything but sit and wait for the game to start …and that’s when the fans got rough. This time around, we’re going to Argentina to train, and get into Uruguay at the last minute and head straight to the ground after that.

Good luck, mate. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Ozzies make the mondiale. As for me, I’m just hoping Team USA makes it farther than the Italians again. My calcio-playing friends always enjoy a rousing round of The Star-Spangled Banner being sung in their ear; my Portugeuse teammate introduced me to some very bad new words after the USA scored its third goal against Figo and company last time around.

I’m kind of conflicted about France, though. While Spacebunny and I always pull for England, it’s hard to cheer against current and former Arsenal stalwarts such as Henry, Pires, Viera and Wiltord.

Speaking of Arsenal, how about that Dutch kid? The second-coming of Dennis Bergkamp, he is. I thought he had that five-minute hat-trick until the ball went wide.

I had a chance to meet up again with Umberto Eco last night; I was surprised and more than a little delighted to find that he remembered me. (Spacebunny wryly notes that when you follow someone around for 17 hours, accompanied by a film crew, they only wish they could forget you.) Even better, he said that he had no objections to my using an old essay of his in the anthology I’m currently editing.

It’s not a done deal yet because I still have to get permission from the publisher, but the lady with whom I spoke didn’t seem to feel that would be a problem. We’ll see. I’m not going to start counting any chickens yet.

And yes, it was pretty funny when midway through the conversation, it suddenly hit him that we were speaking Italian.

Spacebunny may mock me for being such a fanboy, but at least I’m not writing derivative fan fiction. That would be Dan Brown.

The Opinionista is really, truly, very sorry. At least, she’d like you to think so:

I’m a liberal apologizer. The phrase “I’m sorry” rolls regularly down my tongue like wheeled luggage on a ramp. I’ve been told it’s a common female trait, that women are taught to be meek and cave in the face of conflict, suppressing their aggression behind an endless stream of penitential apologies. But in my case the words flow easily because they hold little actual meaning. The implicit “You were right, I was wrong” expressed in the phrase never fails to placate and mollify, so I employ it with aplomb. I can’t think of any other word that serves such multi-purposes – appeasing others, dissipating anger and deescalating nearly any situation, so everyone wins. As long as my end result is achieved, I’ll gladly apologize my way out of a bind with all guise of contrition.

I remember a girl in college who couldn’t figure out why I stopped seeing her after a minor social offense. I think she was an hour late for a date or something equally trivial.

“I said I was sorry,” she protested.

And she had, immediately, just as she had on all the previous occasions. Now, I’m not a time fascist, but I harbor an inherent distrust of anyone who will so readily apologize without feeling any sense of contrition or obligation to modify their behavior in the future.

The ability to apologize is tremendously important, but without the force of genuine contrition behind it, an apology is meaningless.

By the way, the Opinionista’s blog is quite entertaining. Among other things, it offers ample justification for one’s opinion of lawyers as evolutionary precursors to Gromphadorhina portentosa. I couldn’t help but notice this bit too:

Because junior associates in competitive law firms embody a peer group of twenty/thirtysomethings dominated by a slavish work ethic and near-maniacal eagerness to please. Be it for our parents, teachers, coaches, admissions officers, professors, interviewers, we are skilled experts in the art of presenting a human blueprint of perfection to anyone in authority. We’re the proverbial pack of Pavlovian labradors dying to salivate on cue – all you have to do is ring the dinner bell and we’ll obediently come running every time. We’ll do anything in our physical power to amuse today’s masters. But begin beating us if we fail to drool quickly enough, and we’ll crawl into our crates, lick our wounds and eventually snap our jaws at the sight of you striding angrily down the taupe hallway.

That should explain why so many lawyers are jackboot-licking Democrats. Although one of my best friends is an attorney, he’s one of the few good guys I’ve encountered from the profession. Of course, he couldn’t stand the law firm nonsense either, so he went corporate and I don’t think he’s regretted it.

Big Chilly and I once attended a reception at TPAM’s law firm when he was still there; the lawyers didn’t realize we were corporate clients and not mere lowlife friends because we were both wearing ripped jeans and t-shirts. TPAM nearly had an aneurysm trying not to burst out laughing after the firm’s resident jerk offered his hand and introduced himself to me in the most contemptuous possible manner.

I simply shook his hand, smiled beatifically, and said: “I’m not wearing any underwear.” Big Chilly howled, TPAM’s eyes bulged out as he tried to avoid doing the same and the lawyer jerk just stared with his mouth open, with no clue what to do or say.

I don’t have much interest in primate dominance games, but they can be amusing from time to time.

I don’t know if I can actually make it to 100, but we’ll see.

1. The preponderance of lethal violence.

Television writers who show violence through their portrayals of criminals or mentally unbalanced individuals like to claim that they are simply showing reality. But the actual reality is that in a nation of 300 million people, only 16,137 people were murdered in 2004. This is one in every 18,591 people, which means the average American has a .00538 percent chance of becoming a murder victim.

The televised murder rate, on the other hand, has to be something on the order of one in thirty. With only thirty or so characters on a show, one or two people are usually getting whacked despite the stupendous odds against this. This is only realistic in comparison with portrayals of faster-than-light space travel, alien invasions and straight women’s basketball coaches.

And don’t give me the excuse that this surfeit of unlikely violence exists only because it’s a police show or whatever. The average police officer never once fires his gun in the line of duty over the course of his career. In fact, I would surmise that there are probably more TV criminals killed by TV police in a single season of television than there are real criminals killed by real police over an entire year.

Papapete assaults the language:

Gregg (and Vox to a certain extent) are technically correct. However, if you ask the proverbial “man-on-the-street” you would get a definition much closer to Chuck’s than Gregg’s. Therefore Gregg and Vox are technically correct in calling Japanese internment camps “concentration camps”. If one uses the popular definition, then the internment camps weren’t “concentration camps”.

Vox, you know what the connotations of “concentration camps” are as well as I do. To use that term in this instance is less than honest.

And if you ask the proverbial “man-on-the-street” he will also tell you that the Founding Fathers established America as a democracy, that the Federal Reserve is a government institution and that the United Nations is an idealistic force for good. This does not make him correct, this simply makes him ignorant. The fact that Chuck, and presumably, Papapete, wish to mutilate the language of a well-defined word simply to whitewash American history does not make me less than honest.

There have been many concentration camps in the 20th century. The 33 camps in which the British imprisoned the Boers from 1899-1902 were, prior to the National Socialist varieties, the most infamous.

From Wikipedia: “Over the course of the twentieth century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the authority of the state became more common and reached a climax with the practice of genocide in the death camps of the Nazi regime in Germany, and with the Gulag system of forced labor camps of the Soviet Union. As a result of this trend, the term concentration camp carries many of the connotations of extermination camp and is sometimes used synonymously. In technical discussion, however, it is important to understand that a concentration camp is not, by definition, always a Nazi-style death-camp.”

The 1/1/2005 Washington Post report on the federal government’s plan to establish camps in the United States as part of the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism might seem alarming at first, but fortunately they are described as “detention camps”, so those worried about “internment camps”, “concentration camps” or “death camps” need not lose any sleep over them.

If you can’t put your faith in an adjective, what can you trust?

Cedarford writes:

“Gregg has recently become enamored of the deceitful language of the Left. He knows the word concentration camp is loaded. It is typically used only in context of Nazis these days.”

Yes, that’s why it wasn’t used to describe the, um, non-concentration camps in Bosnia, right? And why it won’t be used again as soon as the French start rounding up Muslims.

The only attempted linguistic manipulation going on here is Cedarford’s. Everyone here knows perfectly well that the Japanese-Americans weren’t put into ovens.

The larger point, which those who wish to whitewash American history are studiously avoiding, is that a government with the power to dispossess you and round you up without trial is a government with the power to pop you into a Zyklon B shower if it so chooses.

The fact that the American government was less ill-intentioned than the National Socialist government is true, but that is damnation by praise so faint it can barely be detected by microscope.