Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Hypocrisy thy name is EdwardsJohn Edwards wants to ban Brownies.
Former Sen. John Edwards said at a Hurricane Katrina conference he would propose what he called “Brownie’s Law” requiring that qualified people, not political hacks, lead key federal agencies.
Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, drew laughter when he spoke on Monday of the proposal at the “Hope and Recovery Summit” ahead of the two-year anniversary of the storm on Wednesday.
“It’s an absolute travesty to have people who are essentially political hacks in a very responsible position,” he told the audience at the University of New Orleans.
“Brownie” refers to Michael Brown, who was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Katrina struck the United States on August 29, 2005. He was criticized as being a political appointee unprepared to lead FEMA when a floundering government effort stranded thousands for days in flooded New Orleans.
This is from a man who ran for president before he finished his first term in office. This is from a man with one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. Who couldn’t even carry his own state.
Of course, I agree with his sentiments, but that would preclude him from being elected President. Which he won’t be.
UPDATE: Now this dufus is telling people to downscale their rides for the environment. This is from a guy who lives in a 28,000-square-foot mansion. Riiiight.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Steampunk Workshop
A website that catalogs people’s Steampunk mods to things. Love the Altoids tins.
The Boston Globe has done an article on the rise in Steampunk popularity.
Stupidity DuJour
Harder to fathom is why audiences return. Fans who tolerate the repetitiveness and ideological bankruptcy of the “Rush Hour” franchise, for example, may be testaments to the power of hope and a need for familiarity at a time when the Iraq war continues unabated, pensions and polar ice disappear, and Al Qaeda videos enjoy wider distribution than Sundance winners.
NY Times Film Critic Jeannette Catsoulis on why this years summer sequels propelled the film business to a record year.
It seems they will go to any length to bash the war or promote the global warming agenda.
Doctor Who and Torchwood
I started to download all of this season’s Doctor Who episodes from Bit torrent and just finished the season. They have all the BBC broadcasts up there. The last half of this season was amazing, starting with Human Nature. That aired on the Sci Fi channel Friday. They bring back a major Who villain for the final three episodes. I won’t say who, but they got Derek (I Claudius, Underworld: Evolution) Jacobi in one of the episodes, which was a coup. I’ve gotta say, this new Who series has been excellent. It’s uneven sometimes, like the two part Daleks in Manhattan this season. But when they have their best writers on an episode, it can be amazing. Check out Blink in a couple of weeks on Sci Fi. Really great stuff.
So now I’ve been downloading Torchwood episodes. That’s the spin off show that has Captain Jack Harkness, the bisexual immortal con man from the future who runs a Welsh version of the X-Files. It seems pretty good so far. They apparently do more cross overs with Who next season when Martha Jones is in 5 episodes.
Here’s the first part of the Sarah Jane Adventures show starring Elizabeth Sladen. This is a spin off of Doctor Who as well. Sarah Jane has been consistently voted the most popular of the Doctor’s companions. I have to say, she has held up remarkably well considering she was on Doctor Who in the mid 1970s.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Matt Roach: RIP
Jazz lost one of its greatest drummers Wednesday. Roach revolutionized percussion.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Wrapped in PlasticJust when I thought the comic book business couldn’t get any crazier, someone surprises me.
REMEMBER when comic books were considered too juvenile to be read? Now it appears that they have become too valuable to be touched.
A company in Sarasota, Fla., has created a sensation among collectors by taking their comic books, both rare vintage issues and brand-new ones, and encasing them in plastic slabs that make them both unreadable and instantly more valuable.
The Captain Marvel and Donald Duck comic books that arrive at the offices of the Certified Guaranty Co. are treated like archival treasures of the highest order—armed sentries guard the lobby, technicians and appraisers wear latex gloves as they carefully examine each page and a sophisticated sonic device is used to seal the books up in the sturdy plastic containers that some collectors call “coffins.”
Depending on the age and pedigree of the book being appraised and “slabbed,” CGC charges from $12 to $1,000 for its services and, in upcoming months, the 7-year-old company will slab its 1 millionth comic book. That book may be a 60-year-old issue of Detective Comics that costs as much as a Porsche but it could also be the latest $3 issue of World War Hulk—about half of the books that come to CGC now are fresh from the printer and probably 80% of them have never been read.
“It’s changed the nature of the hobby, it’s turned comic books into a medium of exchange instead of a medium of entertainment,” groaned James Friel, who works at Comic Relief, the longtime landmark store in Berkeley. To Friel, who has been collecting comics since 1958, “it makes these books a sealed-up commodity. You can’t read them. It makes me sad. Some of these books will be sealed up forever.”
Read the whole things. It’s nuts.
15 Simple Kung Fu Trick
Almost anyone can do these. Make yourself look badass.
Signs of the Times
When service is bad, improvise.
Land of the sexually repressed.
The More the Things Change
This is all too common and yet another reason not to trust the governments intentions. The facts are, give people power and money they will want more. And will do anything to get it. Throw a lot of money at a problem and all the crooks come sniffing around. And who gets punished for trying to stop them?
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.
Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
A lot of lefty blogs are using this story as an example of how corrupt the Bush administration is, but anti-whistleblower laws are as much a Democrat thing as Republican. The sad truth about wars is they make excellent places to skim money and steal and resell hardware. It was true in WWII, where much of the supplies set over to the troops on the front line never made it because they were stolen and resold. It happens in every war and you would think there would be a serious effort to stop it. Especially when our money and material is being resold to the enemy.
The military, the government, are supposed to prevent this and yet here they are more or less encouraging it.
And they wonder why people complain about taxes.
Friday, August 24, 2007
I Nominate Syria
Australia is not Iran, BTW
