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Sunday, September 10, 2006

---Gulf Quake, 9-11 Five Years Later, Atlantis Launches, Goat-Free Roads, and Other Stories 

My Way News [AP]- 6.0 Gulf Quake Felt From La. to Fla.
There was an earthquake in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday?! It was evidently mostly harmless, a geological curiosity.
These are very unusual events for our region.
In 1952, according to the AP story, there were reports that a similar event "interfered with the writing of a parking ticket".

Five Years Later....
My Way News [AP] - Bushes Lay Wreaths at Trade Center Site
It was a monstrous act of unrestrained evil, which the now-deceased principals thought would make God proud of them. If only we could ask them for an update. But as Jesus once said about another evil man, it wouldn’t really do any good anyway.
There are two kinds of people in the world, fools and damned fools. The difference is that regular fools occasionally learn something from their mistakes before being destroyed by them.
A lot of other people, good and bad, died five years ago. A lot of the rest of us wish we could go back and play that move from the last save-game again....
A less constructive part of my consciousness wonders if the Palestinians, in their Hamas-governed homeland, will come to regret dancing at that particular funeral.

I still remember that---even as the President preached to the nation and a joint session of Congress about Islam as the "religion of peace", desperate to avoid a backlash against Muslims in America which never materialized anyway---powerful voices spoke against use of the traditional American request for God's Blessing on our injured country on T-shirts and bumper stickers, preferring instead phrases like "Proud of America". I remember that---as our military began to set up detention facilities for terrorist suspects from Iraq and Afghanistan which included copies of the Koran provided to the detainees at American taxpayers' expense---powerful voices and our judiciary continued the equally desperate effort to completely extirpate all traces of Christian thought from public discourse.
Stop it! If you force us to decide "God or Country", you'll lose! What kind of fools are you?
There is a lot of blame to go around, a lot of people who were looking in the wrong direction, a lot of people who foolishly sought to exploit the misery of others for political gain, and a lot of people who just enjoy blowing stuff up and killing people because they grew up reading the wrong kind of fairy tales.

But now the world is a very different place, and we will have to run this race from where we are now. There are, without a doubt, worse things to come. We just need try to learn something from our mistakes every now and then, without having them run over us in the process. If you let your Father hold your hand, you won't get in front of those moving mistakes nearly as often....

Speaking of...
FOXNews.com - 9/11 TV Film Sparks Clinton Administration Outrage
...playing moves over, former officials of the Clinton era have expressed unprecedented collective anger over the upcoming ABC portrayal of events and decisions leading up to the ultimate failure to prevent the 9-11 attacks. Considering that some of them admit to not having seen the miniseries, it makes one wonder what they might be feeling so sensitive about.

Since I posted...
JWR: Michelle Malkin:"The Theater of Jihad"
...a few remarks soon after the events in Qana, Lebanon several weeks ago, other people have found much more detail about the tragedy. Those unprofessional, out-of-control ‘bloggers have been cutting up the reports and photos from the collapsed buildings. Things don’t add up, of course, from a certain monotonous regularity in the parade of men holding babies' corpses to the peculiar absence of males of fighting age among the victims.

LGF:"Harvard Dean: We Need Dialog with Islamic Fascists"
One of the most prominent of the unprofessional, out-of-control ‘bloggers reports from a Boston Globe story about dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government David Ellwood’s plans to invite former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to have a “dialog” on campus on the eve of the anniversary of the New York attacks.
LGF is evidently the source of the newly minted term for inconsistencies in “professional” news images----“faux-tography”. Here is a growing list of examples:
lgf: Fauxtography Updates
Here is an extremely sarcastic video clip on the subject:
lgf: All Your Fakes Are Belong To Us

Meanwhile....

My Way News[AP] - Saudis Consider Banning Women From Mecca
Of course, I never knew that women were allowed into Mecca, nor ever thought to ask. It would be more useful to inquire of those reporting the action, why they keep publishing these stories like they expect this stuff to make sense in the first place?

FL Today/Space: "Atlantis bound for space station"
The “Penguin” finally flew, and the crew is inspecting the Shuttle’s thermal protection.
SPACE.com -- Shuttle Atlantis Likely Unharmed by Fuel Tank Foam
Various pieces
of debris were shed from the External Tank on ascent. The incidents occurred above 300,000 ft., where it is unlikely that they could have struck the orbiter with significant energy.

...and this week’s HeartBreakLogNews “O Brave New World” award goes to:
The “new NASA”, where they now let actual engineers sit in with the MBA’s and lawyers while critical safety decisions are being made, and lifelong black-listing and dungeon time for the dissenters have been dramatically reduced:
FL Today Space:"Engineers' input important in decision"

SPACE.com -- Newfound Object Further Blurs Planet Definition
It’s apparently a “brown dwarf”---a sort of failed star. “Dwarf” is kind of a strange term for something 12 times more massive than Jupiter, but it still isn’t big enough to brew up into a thermonuclear furnace. This one is thought to be too far out to have formed naturally from the “red dwarf” companion’s accretion disc. This is yet another thorny conundrum for the astronomers currently wrestling with the definition of “planet”.

g2zero archive: Examining defects in the Firefox code base [found on BlogsNow]
So...like...Firefox isn’t perfect? No, evidently not. It’s way ahead of IE, but still has nagging problems---mostly unreferenced null pointers and memory leaks. Why does this happen? Because computer programming doesn't actually work....

NON-WORKINGMONKEY
Amazingly, I have discovered a European, actually an English woman, with a sense of humor---not entirely repeatable or agreeable in all cases, but extant....it’s a start.
...or maybe it’s an end. There is no doubt, though, that chronically unemployed people get some strange ideas. Leaving these opinionated people sitting around with nothing to do---or lose---is probably a bad idea.

BBC NEWS | Americas | 'Goat-free roads made me speed' [found on BlogsNow]
Try this excuse the next time you drive in Europe, or maybe New Zealand, and get stopped for speeding. It should at least be good for a laugh while they write the ticket, and maybe an earthquake will “interfere”.
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Comments:
No no, you've got it all wrong: it's the English who say "Amazingly, I came across an American with a sense of humour." That's the only way it works. Then everyone says 'Garrison Keilor' and 'Bill Bryson', and we all do that thing when you pretend to die of boredom, because everyone knows they're not that funny.

And no, I'm not trying to start a 'who's funniest' thing - I know a lot of awfully funny Americans (and some Canadians), and like them very much. They're almost as funny as a funny English person.

PS Although I think of myself as European, when it comes to 'funny/not-funny', I am English; for e.g., the Germans are never funny, and the French think Benny Hill is funny.
Ok, you win. I give up....
Oh don't give up!

xxx
Oh don't give up!

xxx
Too late....
Okay, well, I have to admit that my knowledge of English social behavior comes almost entirely from watching "Dr. Who" reruns---without subtitles.

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