Category Archives: Uncategorized

Spramos


Seven-minute Sopranos.

Two days till The Sopranos starts again. Hooray! And that means we recently re-subscribed to HBO - cause we have to watch them first-run, or our friends will blab all the plot to us before the DVDs come out. And then, eight weeks later, we'll cancel. Hah.

I remember, ten, fifteen years ago, when getting HBO meant calling the cable company, setting up an appointment, waiting for the cable guy to come out and attach a descrambler to your cable line somewhere - maybe giving you a new cable box to handle the new channels. The process took weeks. These days, I go on line, enter my name and address, click a box, and channels 400-420 start carrying all the different HBO variations (time-shifted, HD, Spanish, etc). It's magic - a similar sort of magic to the magic that lets me marvel about that magic, here, in fact. All hail the intermagic.

You Call That Humiliation?

    I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

Terry Jones, in the Guardian Unlimited

b.t.w., Firefox thinks he misspelled 'civilized', 'behavior', and 'recognized'.

A Trip To Market

John Thullen makes a funny about his trip to the market, in the comments at Obsidian Wings:

    I arrived at high-speed in an armored humvee, screeching to a halt directly adjacent to the front door. My personal guards hustled me (helmeted, kevlared from neck to foot, gasmasked, grenaded, communications headset in place in case I had to communicate with home regarding the desirability of skim versus 2% milk, eyes sheilded by cool reflective sunglasses with night-vision capabilities) through the door and we proceeded to the dairy case, each aisle of the store secured as we went by Blackwater Special Forces personnel.

There's more at the link.

And sure, it's fun to make fun of delusional John McCain from my peaceful office park, here in the US; but it's not so funny over there, is it:

    A newborn baby was one of at least 14 children and adults killed when a suicide bomber detonated a lorry laden with explosives close to a primary school in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk yesterday.

    The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.