Yearly Archives: 2006

Dept. of Weird Malapropisms

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Mike Tyson famously once said something about “fading into Bolivia,” which we like a lot. In the same vein, we dreamed the other night about someone being ineptly described as vicious by saying they “go straight for the juggler.” Awesome.

YesYesYes

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Fafblog weighs in on the cartoon controversy. It begins like this, and then gets even better:

“What if it’s not really a picture of Mohammed,” says me, “just a picture of a picture of Mohammed?” “Metablasphemy!” says Giblets. “It is sacrilegious and pretentious!” “What if it just looks like a picture a Mohammed but it’s really a picture a Jesus wearin a real good Mohammed costume?” says me. “Then it is pretend blasphemy,” says Giblets. “God can’t tell the difference. He has to smite you just to make sure.”

(Their follow-up is deliciously pointed as well.)

Google Video Update

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It turns out, at least according to BoingBoing that Google Video allows the uploader to determine what countries may or may not view the file. Ergo, whomever uploaded the IED video decided that USAians need not see it, not Google.

Things we’re sorry to see

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Our cousin, being a jerk and whining about “legislating from the bench.” Either he doesn’t understand the function of the Judiciary, or he’s being deliberately disingenuous for political reasons. As the aforelinked blogger notes, it’s only “legislating from the bench” if you don’t like the ruling.

The appearance — at a rural junior college not far from the Heathen hometown — appears tied to a promo tour for his book on the confirmation process. Pickering refers to it as bitter and partisan, but presumably assumes no blame for resistance to his nomination based on his actual record. We don’t think he’s a racist, but anyone who did work for the Sovereignty Commission — and who wrote memos in support of anti-miscegenation statutes — shouldn’t expect a smooth glide to the appeals bench.

Things we love

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SSH tunneling, because it means we don’t have to trust nefarious hotel wireless networks (though despite the endorsement implied, we didn’t actually use the tool — geeks that we are, we wrote a script).

Amateur Night at the Airport

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We totally forgot that there was some big to-do in Houston this weekend, so we were taken by surprise by the degree to which the airport was taken over by rank amateurs. We damn near missed our flight partly due to gawking tourists wholly unaccustomed to airports, cities, security, etc.

Look: if you don’t fly much, at least take the time to check out what the regulations are before you get to the security checkpoint. Wearing metal-accented clothes in an airport is just plain dumb in 2006, people. Ditto on boots that take 10 minutes to take off while the line grows behind you. Know what you have to take off and what you don’t, and plan accordingly. You did just spend 30 minutes in line, didn’t you?

How much is that really?

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BoingBoing points us to a fascinating tool for comparing the relative value of dollars in different time periods. One of their illustrating examples is pretty cool:

Babe Ruth’s salary in 1932 was $80,000. In 2004 the CPI was 13.8 times larger than it was in 1932 and the GDP deflator 12 times larger. This means that if we are interested in Ruth’s purchasing power of housing or meals, then he was “earning” the equivalence of about $1,000,000 today. The relative cost of (unskilled) labor is 42 times higher in 2004 than in 1932. So if we wanted to compare his wage to what someone selling hot dogs would earn, we could say his “relative wage” is $3,400,000. GDP per capita and GDP are 80 and 200 times larger in 2004 than they were in 1932. Thus Ruth’s earnings relative to the average output would be $6,230,000 today. Finally, as a share of GDP, Ruth “output” that year would be $16,000,000 in today’s money.

Things you should know, Mac edition

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We received a concerned email in re: the “Mac virus” that’s floating around. Here’s our reply:

From:   [king heathen]
Subject: Re: what about this mac virus mary's telling me about?
Date: February 17, 2006 8:32:32 PM CST
To:   [co-worker]

> On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:07 PM, [coworker] wrote:
> what do I need to know / do?

1. If people try to send you files with iChat that 
   you're not expecting, don't accept them.

2. If you do accept them, 
   don't uncompress them.

3. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them, 
   don't execute the contents by double-clicking the file.

4. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them 
   and double-click the contents, 
   don't type your admin password.

5. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them 
   and double-click the contents 
   and type your admin password, 
   well, then you'll be infected, and the trojan will try to spread 
   itself. It doesn't do anything else, but it will be annoying.

Summary? It requires so much intervention from the user to get 
installed and run that it's only barely a trojan. Since it's so 
lame in those terms AND has no destructive payload, it's pretty 
much a non-event.

There more here if you want.

Dick Cheney Says He’s Above The Law

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Cheney has asserted that he has the authority to declassify information.

Setting aside for a moment that no statute grants him this power, consider the implications for the Plame affair if it’s true. Could Cheney have declassified Plame’s status before leaking it? Would that make it legal (if, perhaps, even more reprehensible)?

More lies

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The Austin American Statesman is reporting that Whittington was hit with around 100 pellets.

A 28-gauge shell only has about 300 pellets in it. This absolutely does not square with the “thirty yards” bit we’ve been fed earlier. Overnight observation is one thing, too, but Whittington is by all accounts still hospitalized three days later. If you hit someone with 1/3 of the load in as tight a pattern as his injuries suggest (lower face, chest, left shoulder), and he’s in the hospital for days on end, well, your unfortunate hunting parter was substantially closer than 30 yards.

(Paul Begala agrees.)

More on Cheney and Hunting

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This editorial in the Charlotte Observer backs up what we said yesterday: it is, unequivocably, Cheney’s fault. The writer goes further, too, in exploring the other questionable aspects to this “hunt.” If he’s such an accomplished and avid hunter, he ought to know all the rules listed therein.

Of course, the White House continues to assert it was Whittington at fault, which is plainly bullshit, and is fortunately being called as such:

Several hunting experts were skeptical of McClellan’s explanation. They said Cheney might have violated a cardinal rule of hunting: Know your surroundings before you pull the trigger. “Particularly identify the game that you are shooting and particularly identify your surroundings, that it’s safe to shoot,” said Mark Birkhauser, the incoming president of the International Hunter Education Association, a group of fish and wildlife agencies. “Every second, you’re adjusting your personal information that it is a safe area to shoot or it’s not a safe area to shoot.” Safe-hunting rules published by the National Rifle Association and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department echo Birkhauser’s advice. “Be absolutely sure you have identified your target beyond any doubt,” the NRA says in the gun-safety rules on its Web site. “Equally important, be aware of the area beyond your target. This means observing your prospective area of fire before you shoot. Never fire in a direction in which there are people or any other potential for mishap. Think first. Shoot second.”

There’s more feedback from real hunters here.

ABA says Bush full of it

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From Yahoo/AP:

CHICAGO — The American Bar Association denounced President Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution. The program has prompted a heated debate about presidential powers in the war on terror since it was disclosed in December. The nation’s largest organization of lawyers adopted a policy opposing any future government use of electronic surveillance in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes without first obtaining warrants from a special court set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The 400,000-member ABA said that if the president believes the FISA is inadequate to protect Americans, he should to ask Congress to amend the act. Bush and his administration have defended the warrantless eavesdropping, saying it is needed to fill a gap in U.S. security and is allowable under both the president’s constitutional powers and the congressional measure authorizing him to go to war in September 2001. The ABA has urged Congress to affirm that when it authorized Bush to go to war, it did not intend to endorse warrantless spying.

(Thanks to Triple-F, who appears to be recovering nicely.)

What you need to know about Cheney and hunting

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If you shoot somebody when you’re hunting, it’s your fault. Period. When you’re holding a gun, the margin of error is pretty slim (though it’s wider with birdshot than with a deer rifle). This means it’s fundamentally your responsibility where your pellets end up. Josh Marshall backs us up on this with feedback from his hunter-readers. The description from (landowner) Armstrong as paraphrased by Marshall sounds right:

The birds ‘flush’. Cheney picks out a bird and starts following it. In the process he basically wheels around doing a 180. So he’s spun around and is now firing backwards relative to the direction he had been facing. And Whittington was just, for whatever reason, where Cheney didn’t expect him to be.

Which is irrelevant or a lie. Cheney was in a group trying to flush birds, and that means you can’t assume someone isn’t behind you. “Doing a 180” means you need to be very, very, very careful, since that means you have or will end up facing your fellow hunters.

The comments provided by Mary Matalin are clearly just more Republican lies:

The vice president was concerned. He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.

We don’t doubt that Cheney feels bad. He should. The reason he should, though, is that he did do something “he wasn’t supposed to do;” he didn’t keep his field of fire clear. He behaved carelessly. And as a result, somebody’s in the hospital. He’s very lucky — as is Whittington, who could easily been killed; we suspect his injuries are more serious than they’re letting on, though, since he’s in ICU. Hunting accidents are no means unheard of (though in a lifetime of hunting, we’ve never seen it happen), but when one does happen, an honorable man admits his fault — as he does with any accident. So our takeaway with the Cheney shooting is that, well, he’s not admitting fault. Make of this what you will.

Update: CNN has a bit more data. Apparently Whittington was about 30 yards away, and Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge. If true, these bits of data taken together suggest there wasn’t much danger of Whittington’s injuries being fatal (though, as we said, only one pellet needs to get lucky).

A 28 is <b>very</b> small. Most hunters just carry the all-purpose 12-gauge, which (when paired with the right load) can take anything from whitetail deer down to small game like quail or rabbit. Smaller shotguns (16, 20, 28, and .410) use progressively smaller amounts of powder paired with fewer pellets per load. Some people use 20s for birds or other small game -- they are lighter guns, and the recoil is easier to take -- but only very rich people carry 28s. There are no "utility" 28s like the $200 shotguns most of Red America buys at Wal-Mart. These are exclusively hand-made or hand-finished guns, probably over-and-unders, with price tags to match (more than $1,500 certainly; more than $10,000 isn't unheard of). Traditional American shotgun companies don't even make them; you have to go to Beretta or other high-end manufacturers.




That Whittington is apparently doing well (and never even lost consciousness, according to the story above) is the result of the small loads involved, his distance from Cheney (30 yards is a long way for a shotgun; it's hard to take any game at that range), the small gauge of the gun, and good luck.

Real Christians and the GOP part ways

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Slacktivist covers this in two posts:

  • First, he notes the cover story in Christianity Today, which makes clear that torture is never, ever acceptable, and that reminds us that things like extraordinary rendition are no better; and
  • Second, the endorsement by 86 mainstream evangelical leaders of a call to action on global warming. This isn’t just left-of-center people; it’s genuine red-state evangelicals, too.

In case you forgot what useless, craven jackasses they are at Fox News

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Media Matters points out (as has Olbermann) their little trick in re: Rev. Joseph Lowery’s remarks during Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Lowery made mention of the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, which got a significant amount of applause (23 seconds, according to MM). Fox edited out the applause in replaying the clip, and then made comments about the audience’s lack of response. You don’t get much closer to just plain making shit up than that.