Vox Popoli

I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I have to admit that despite my near complete disinterest in baseball, I’m kind of glad that the Cubs lost. From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem kind of a shame to cast aside such a long and distinguished record of failure. As for the Red Sox, the only question is whether the Sports Guy – may he live forever – would be more suicidal if they A) lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS; or B) went on to the World Series and lost to the Marlins.

I’m going with (B). Florida is still an expansion team in the hearts and minds of baseball’s purists. You’d think, as a Vikings fan who can still remember crying his eyes out when the Vikes lost their fourth Super Bowl to Oakland, I’d have more sympathy. But I don’t.

By the way, did anyone else think it was funny that Tom Clancy matched up the Vikes against the Broncos in The Sum of All Terror? Of course, the joke has lost its punch now that Denver has two wins under their orange-and-blue belts. Tom, you know you should have gone with the Bills! I bet it still annoys him that he didn’t.

John Derbyshire of National Review writes an interesting account of his brief clash with fame, when he appeared as a bit character in a Bruce Lee movie. I tend to agree with his opinion that Bruce Lee and jeet koon do were basically one and the same; it’s not a fighting style so much as it’s the way a uniquely talented fighter fought. You can train one hundred fighters in exactly the same discipline, and they will still fight one hundred different ways.

Except, that is, for tae kwon do. Take one hundred tae kwon do fighters chosen at random, and not a one will know what to do with his hands or bother to guard his head.

There is simply no excuse for this intentional slight of Israel. Thanks to DG, who brought this State Department map of Saudi Arabia to my attention. Notice how State was able to find space for labeling the tiny little island of Bahrain, but somehow, they just couldn’t fit the six letters that make up the name of the only Jewish country in the vicinity on the map.

I am not Jewish. I am not particularly fond of Jewish culture. I dislike the quasi-socialism that has made up Israeli government policy for the entirety of its existence. But I have nothing but contempt for the Arabists at State, who would like to help their murderous proxies finish what the National Socialists started by wiping out what they consider to be a “s—– little country”.

There has got to be a spiritual component to this irrational, illogical Jew hatred. There’s simply no other credible explanation for two millenia of rabid cross-cultural antipathy.

I have never understood why the Palestinian murderocracy is permitted to play whack-a-Jew while the State Department cheers them on and lobbies for the PA to receive more financial support from the U.S. government. What really infuriates me, though, is that Arafat and his bloodthirsty gang are again being permitted to murder Americans with total impunity. Arafat has killed Americans before, and I have no doubt that he will do so in the future until President Bush finds a backbone and shows more resolve in shutting down the monster than did his predecessors: Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Carter. You can’t tell me that Arafat believes we’re going to strike back, when we jump all over Israel every time they justifiably hit back at the poor, defenseless murderers. I have no doubt that later today we’ll hear plenty of somber condemnations worded in the harshest possible terms. Whatever.

I have many doubts about the so-called War on Terror, but chief among them is this: if we are truly fighting against terror, why is the godfather of terror, the creator of modern terrorism, left in peace?

Why not? Here’s my three votes:

Father Joe’s Corner…

Inspiration

NOVAK KNEW BETTER THAN TO BURN VALERIE PLAME

Blogspot was acting up for about two hours. I couldn’t view it, either via the general Internet or from within Blogger itself, and while I could see and edit posts, I couldn’t publish. At first, I assumed it was something I’d done – sign of an inveterate tinkerer’s guilty conscience – but after checking out other blogs in the Blogosphere, I was relieved to discover that whatever it was wasn’t of my making. Which would have been hard to credit anyhow, considering what a plain vanilla blog this is… and will remain. The text is king!

On the Redhat front, some fortunate poking around revealed this important message with regards to kernel upgrades and Linksys drivers:

A final note to remember. In the future, whenever you need to upgrade to a newer kernel, you’ll also need to reinstall these drivers. These files are compiled specifically for your current kernel version/arch, so they won’t work with upgrades. For this reason, I always check that driver site to see if a new set of drivers has been released before I upgrade to newer kernels.

In other words, don’t trust your friendly neighborhood supertechnical stud programmer who guesses that the low-level changes are unlikely to mess with your PCMCIA drivers. Or rather, trust, but verify. Anyhow, I’ll definitely wait for Saint Tim to get around to updating the kernel RPM before upgrading the kernel now.

Linux is not a digital paradise, as yet, but we’re getting there. One of the biggest annoyances I’ve run into thus far is the package dependency problem. I wanted to download a newsreader, but XNews doesn’t run under Linux, so I did a little research and learned that Pan is considered to be roughly equivalent to Agent, one of the more popular Windows newsreaders. Then, after downloading Pan’s installation package, I learned that I needed eight other packages in order for it to install properly.

Fine, fair enough, since the new version of Pan is quite a bit newer than the Redhat 8.0 discs from which I installed Linux a while back. I downloaded five of the eight packages, installed two of them, and then learned that the third required two additional packages. Hmmm. So I downloaded those two, installed the first, and then learned that the second required an additional package. Grrrrrr. It was rather like a mixed drink: two-parts cracking open those increasingly smaller Russian dolls and one-part fighting the Hydra sans a fiery brand for the regenerating stumps.

At that point, I gave up, assuming that there had to be a better way. Sure enough, there was. Ximian’s Red Carpet is a little like the Red Hat update agent, only it works a lot better. Not only did it have the Pan interdependencies worked out, downloaded and installed in minutes, but it also resolved a package interdependency issue that had caused the Red Hat update agent to throw in the towel. Very impressive! So much so that I went ahead and upgraded Ximian Evolution, the email program I’m using, without even bothering to read the new features list. Good on ya, Monkey Men.

Unfortunately, Evolution Pilot doesn’t seem to recognize my Dana. But my list of Windows-necessary functions is now down to three. Adieu, sweet Bill….

I still haven’t heard a response from Al Franken, the great champion of Democratic Party manhood. I assume he’s simply been tied up with his book tour, but in case he somehow missed seeing the column in which I posed a challenge to him, I decided to send the following email to his press agent.

Dear Mr. Franken,

I’m a little disappointed that I have not heard from you as yet. Perhaps this column did not happen to come to your attention, in which case I am rectifying matters by sending this to you here. I should also like to interview you, either pre- or post-incontro della contesa.

Very best regards,

Vox Day

Universal Press Syndicate

I hope he’ll get in touch with me soon. I was also interested to see that Rich Lowry has finally addressed the question of Mr. Franken’s slur on his character, although I’m disappointed that Mr. Lowry seems content to contest the matter on the field of words, not combat. My profile is quite a bit lower than the editor of the National Review, but I still feel that it’s a real pity Mr. Franken did not address his original challenge to me. I would have been happy to take him up on it.

Anyhow, Mr. Franken, I eagerly await your response.

16/30 157 5.23 1 2

11/26 126 4.85 1 0

That’s Donovan McNabb’s performance since the affaire d’Limbaugh, which has mysteriously inspired a panoply of headlines crowing that the quarterback was not only not overrated, but was back in a big way as proved by the Eagles’ win over the Redskins. Right, a 48 percent completion ratio to go with an average of 1 TD and 1 INT per game is really stellar, gentlemen. Of course, a lot of these jokers who purport to be sportswriters picked the Eagles to run away with the NFC East, which now looks like this:

4-1 Dallas

3-3 Washington

2-3 New York

2-3 Philadelphia

Looking at that sparks one big thought – dang, but the Big Tuna can coach! The Eagles are by no means out of it, as yet, but a loss to New York next week would make it very, very difficult for them to reclaim the division title if Dallas beats Detroit as expected. Look, Donovan is a decent quarterback, but he’s inaccurate and is looking less and less likely to be a top QB over the next few years. I wouldn’t have dumped James Thrash earlier in favor of picking up Andre Johnson and keeping the faith with superpsycho David Boston – which won me a big game last week – if I had any faith in Donovan’s ability to get him the ball in the end zone.

If you want a black quarterback to talk up and cheer, there’s one in Minnesota worthy of high regard. Welcome back, Mr. Culpepper!

Okay, after some thought and a bit of reader lobbying, I’ve come to the conclusion that it does make sense to add a blogroll. I’ve always been of the opinion that quando a Roma, fa cosi come i Romani, and a brief tour of the blogosphere has proved that a blogroll is standard operating procedure. While I still believe that it is important for a person in the public eye, even one who is barely in the far corner of the public’s peripheral vision such as myself, to be careful of their words and their associations, it would be crazy to be held responsible for something that someone else has written on a site over which one has zero editorial control.

Nevertheless, I fully expect that at some point, my critics will throw a hissy fit when someone on the blogroll goes off the deep end. They’ve shown very little logic or reason in their past attacks, so there’s no reason to assume that they’ll start exhibiting it now that I’ve got a blog.

I’ve also decided to distinguish my readers blogs from the general blogroll, because without them, a writer is basically just talking to himself. Doug Kenline and Christian Bowman, two long-time readers who encouraged me to start blogging, have the distinction of heading the list. I will not be adding a comments section, however, as my blogosphere tour also taught me that an unacceptably high level of public comments on many sites are polluted by trolls, salesmen and porn ads. If you want to make comments about my blog, well, you’ve got a blog too, don’t you?

I will be publicly addressing the occasional email here, though, so if you don’t want me to address yours openly: a) don’t be derogatory, and b) tell me so.