Enlightened europeans look to geniuses like Michael Moore for moral guidance, and news from the colonies. Why? Michael Moore reinforces their stereotypes of americans and America in general. He's an obnoxious, fat loudmouth who drones on incessantly about things he really doesn't understand; he is an unscrupulous capitalist, lying, libelling, and slandering people who have actually made a stand for something in their lives, all the while raking in millions, and all the while playing the part of Working-Class Hero. And, he hates the US so much he can't stand it, scoring another point with the morally anchorless EU crowd.

He was actually in my home town here this week, and of course, the crowds were out in full force. I haven't seen any reports in the news of his appearance, but I can only imagine it was the usual lefty circle-jerk: America sucks, Bush is Hitler, we're all doomed, more pat&eacute?

Of course, it's a good feeling to sit around talking about how bad things are "over there". It lets you ignore just how bad it is where you live. People here would love to have our news programming! Ok, 450 hurt in a bombing in Turkey, but first, the Kobe Jackson Peterson Tapes! Here, they talk about crushing of dissent, and how Bush is ruling the United States with an iron fist, instead of the truly krank economy, or the utter hopelessness of the social welfare state.

Iron fist? How's this for size: In Italy, a comedy show has been cut because they criticized the italian president. In Germany, it's illegal to display a swastika, among other "Verbotene Symbole", even in art. In France, it's illegal to have too many advertisements or too much music in any language other than French. Perhaps in all of Europe, but at least in Germany, you're not tried by a jury of your peers, you're tried by a jury of government employees.

If you read through the U.S. Bill of Rights, there's precious little that you'll find in common with everyday european life. And yet, with that kind oppression, it's comforting to think of how very oppressive this cowboy Bush must be, closing down newspapers left and right, pulling critical television shows off the air, and silencing artists who speak out against him!

Could somebody send me some links for those? I'm at a loss.

Students camp out for poverty awareness - University of Wisconsin-Madison

This is just too good to be true.

I've often been accused of being a liberal. But that was in my college days, when I would make sweeping generalizations like, "Blacks are being oppressed", without thinking about the fact that many blacks like Desmond Tutu, Jesse Jackson, and Dizzy Gillespie could buy and sell my honky ass. But that's the cornerstone of liberalism: Make generalizations about demographics you know nothing about, reducing them to helpless, retarded, unwashed masses, offer them money, and let them know that you understand they can't help it they weren't born rich, good-looking, and white.

Look at the fuckers in this picture. This is a "camp-in for poverty awareness". Huh? Let's take a look at poverty awareness. What's the most important aspect of poverty? Is it camping? Is it being outdoors? Or is it not having money? Revolutionary, I know, but never let a spout of logic spoil your camp-in. "Awareness" isn't what you're engendering here. It should be called, "camp-in for poverty trivialization", or maybe, "Camp-in for trigonometry-studying avoidance". What would a bunch of rich little fuckers like these possibly understand about poverty? Oh, and let me guess: They all voted for Gore.

I accidentally came across this today while stumbling around Yahoo! News!.

There was a time, probably before Hellraiser came out, when she didn't know what she was getting into. She probably thought, "hey, I'll do something different and get my clit pierced." This woman has almost 2,000 piercings. I would really rather be blind than ever see her naked, even over the Internet.

What the hell did we go to war for, anyway? I now know that our whole operation in Iraq was a failure. It was started under false pretenses. The american public has been horribly, horribly misled.

I thought the whole point was, we go in, we kill us some towel-heads, and take all their oil! Well, where is it? I demand to know what Mr. Hit-, I mean Mr. Bush was thinking when he told us in all the secret meetings that, though we were telling the world it was about ending terrorism and freeing Iraq, it was really all about the oil. And now? Americans have fought and died, we've taken the country into our evil clutches, and IRAQIS ARE PAYING 10 CENTS A GALLON FOR GASOLINE? That's our gas they're pumping there!

Impeach Bush! Now!

Man, this is some fascinating stuff.

(found via InstaPundit)

I'm not a huge fan of Netscape products. About the only really sensible thing Netscape has done since they basically invented the Intel-based Web browser was to turn it over to the Open Source community.

Netscape web-servers, however, are big-iron beasts, and power a lot of the sites people have come to rely on, for example The New York Times, ,Washington Post, and L.A. Times, three of the United States' most import online news sources. And while their Novell Enterprise Webserver is strangely a pig, the Netware Internet Mail Server is about the best commercial mail server I've ever set up. It's complicated, but integrates beautifully with NDS and a client-side IMAP infrastructure.

So, tell me, was it the AOL thing that made Netscape jump the shark? Have they really replaced all their big brains with a bunch of tie-wearing suits who wouldn't know a web server from an accelerating cache-proxy? Check out this little tidbit of advice from the Netscape Mail help page:

Q. How do I back up messages?
A. The best way to back up your messages is to print them. That way, even if you have system problems, you still have access to your messages.

What? Did I read that correctly? Has it really gotten that bad? That's almost Microsoft-worthy, only Microsoft would probably say, "the best way to backup your email is to re-install Windows and then type them all again." As among thieves, there is a honor among geeks, so I won't even assume that an administrator at Netscape wrote that horrifying Q&A. Instead, it soothes me to think that it was some clueless knucklehead technical writer fresh out of the Dupree School of Management , probably the very same one who sat down next to me in the NeXT Lab that time and started talking into the mouse¹.

Even though I only use my Netscape Mail address when I register at porno sites, I still expect at least halfway-decent technical support. Everyone knows that the best way to back up emails is to read them aloud to your roommate.

tim say:

Cigarettes, whiskey and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Cigarettes, whiskey and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

Once I was happy and had a good wife
I had enough money to last me for life
Then I met with a gal and we went on a spree
She taught me smokin' and drinkin' whiskee

The insignificant minority of muslims who actually endorse terrorism have struck again. Islamic terrorists have blown a sizeable chunk of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to smithereens, along with bits and pieces of 130 people. Sadly, this is becoming so commonplace in today's world that I barely blinked when I saw the headline today. And I don't even check anymore to see if the people who did this were Presbyterians.

I'm sure that over the next few days we'll see an outpouring of shock and disbelief from the moderate muslim community. Shock and disbelief that, in the name of Islam, animals and criminals like this continue to commit crimes against innocent people. Shock, that they continue to besmirch the good name of Mohammed with their cowardly, heinous deeds.

Actually, that was a joke, and not even a funny one. What will happen over the next week is exactly what happens every time some slimeball terrorist with a Koran in his pocket boards a bus full of old ladies and children and detonates. Namely, "moderate" muslims will scramble to attack anyone who asserts that muslims are even capable of being terrorists, while secretly (and sometimes, not so secretly) celebrating in their hearts yet another effective, successful, and above all strategically intelligent strike against the West that will, certainly, freeze the blood in our veins and shake the ground beneath our feet. What they will not do, however, is speak out in any way against the acts of terrorism, or express sympathy for the Kufr who are killed or injured for no purpose other than eternal islamic Jihad.

Sleep tight.

I know it's not a thing that's particular to Europe, but there's just so much of the inneffectual, bureaucratic shit floating around at the moment.

At the moment? It's really been going on for years, now. I'm not sure if we've ever discussed this, but for the last 10 years or so, there's been a movement among the Germans called the "Neue Rechtschreibung", which basically translates to "The New Way to Write Correctly". Un-be-lievable what kind of energy went into this. They've basically effected changes in all the goofy, idiosyncratic areas of the German language. They've split up some of the longer words (and there are some damn long words) into their component parts, they've marginalized some of the special characters like , , and . Basically, what they've done is taken the language and cleaned up some of the messy legacy weirdness. Ok, it sounds good on paper. For about a second. That meant, of course, that everybody had to re-learn how to write and say many things. They also had to buy the new, updated dictionaries and grammar guides. There's the attendant infrastructure involved in getting 'the word' out, of course. All handed down from on-high by the Big Thinkers of the universites in Berlin, Cologne, and Aachen.

But nobody likes it. And why would this happen, anyway? Who really benefits from the simplification of the language? And who really has the power to decide how people should speak, read, or write? I talked a spell with a friend of mine about all this. She's finishing up her master's degree at the moment, and is therefore digging knuckle-deep in the nose of academia, whence this whole horseshit came. I've never been much of a populist, but the slumbering american frontiersman in me can't even grasp the chutzpah people show when they hand down edicts like this. Languages evolve over centuries, and the inefficient parts die quietly or survive due to their other qualities; aesthetic, humorous, or otherwise. She is more of a typical german from the hinterlands of Bavaria, and usually stares blankly at the university turtlenecks who try to explain how all this is good for "das Volk".

And that brings us to the Euro. It's no different from the Neue Rechtschreibung in my book. It was just something they decided on one day in a glass palace somewhere, and really never took a vote on it. The few countries that relied on referenda to decide whether or not to get their Euro on have all voted no; see Sweden and Great Britain. I read an article in Der Spiegel today that blew my thick, white, cottony, american socks off. The headline was, "Germans are Sitting on D-Mark Coins worth over 3.8 Billion Euros", in reference to the billions of coins people still have in jelly jars, old jackets, and automobile ash-trays. Coins that are now worthless. Personally, I have at least 20 or 30 bucks worth of coins and bills that turned up during the first year of the Euro, and I've only been here a few years. I can't even imagine what my coin-collection would look like if I'd been here my whole life.

So, the article goes on to say that this delinquent coinage represents about half the coins that were in circulation when the Euro went into effect. Half...the...coins. I have absolutely no idea how much of a nation's economy is represented by the coins in circulation. It may be absolutely trivial in contrast to the wealth collected in bank accounts, credit cards, and folding money. But still, that's about 4 Billion dollars that were simply invented by burdening the people of Germany with a currency reformat. Germany may have the second-largest economy in Europe, but it has the most fastidious population, as well as the most miserly. I can't even imagine how much money went missing in the other, more loosy-goosy Euristans. I guess it's one way to revalue your currency: declare a big chunk of it as invalid.

But what the hell am I going on about?

jimmy say:

I met a little girl in Knoxville A town we all know well And every Sunday evening Out in her home I'd dwell

We went to take an evening walk About a mile from town I picked a stick up off the ground And knocked that fair girl down

She fell down on her bended knees For mercy she did cry Oh Willie Dear don't kill me here I'm not prepared to die

She never spoke another word I only beat her more Until the ground around me With her blood did flow

I took her by her golden curls And dragged her round and round Throwing her into the river That flows through Knoxville Town

Perry say:

all the guys that really have the money are too old to have a good time with it too old to turn the women on too old to have a fast car and drive it all the guys that really have the money are too old to party or get dirty too old to turn the women on too old to have a fast car and drive it

Here, you can see my wonderful Windows 3.1 desktop, running under Redhat linux. For some reason, I can't get Syndicate to run. I mean, the real reason behind VMWare was to port Syndicate to Linux, wa'n't?

Sex is a strange, strange thing. I don't have sex with people I don't trust. That causes the problem, however, that I'll trust people quicker if I want to sleep with them.

It takes a fair amount of courage to show someone your penis under the best of circumstances. It's even more complicated if you plan on using it on them. It's not like I'm worried about size or anything, just in case you run a spam company. It's more about acceptance. I mean, you whip it out, you expect at the very least that the other person in the room will have some sort of reaction to give you. Fear is the ideal reaction, girls. Well, reserve, anyway.

I've had some good sex in my long life. I think the best sex I ever had was when Dale, who you can see here (2nd picture), came back one night. She came back with what was (in retrospect obviously) one thing in mind: Saturday night, time to get laid. Damn. Anyway, I never stood a chance. I think I was 20. This needs a little background, I think. We had been going out for 3 years. Then, out of the blue (and, dare I mention, during finals), she broke up with me. Two months later, she comes back, and wants to make good. Ok, "make good" turns out to be going to a couple of frat parties, getting good 'n' toasted, and taking me back to my dorm room and fucking my brains out. But, lemme tell ya, if your ex-girlfriend shows up after a couple of months of being broke up, she will have a couple of new tricks up her sleeve. I think she wanted to show off, I really do. She did shit to me most swedes wouldn't do to a farm animal. Ok, when you're a 20 year old guy, you accept it. Damn. The trick is, of course, not to think about where she learned these tricks, or how she managed to learn them so quickly... Sex is strange. It's not the physical act of licking mucous membranes and pluggin' holes that makes it good. It's the relaxation and trust that it takes to do those things, to generate the context that makes it seem like a normal thing to do. It sure is a shame when people take that and use it for their own evil purposes.

There's not much better than nostalgia. I live in the past, sometimes. Not in the "Glory Days" high-school movie past, like some people. I live more in the recent past. (Side note: High School just isn't recent enough for me, owing to my advanced years).

I just heard a song on Internet Radio. I'm listening to a SomaFM country station. It's a bit different from your normal country, I tell ya. In fact, I just distinctly heard the guitar lick from "Feel a Whole Lot Better" (Byrds) ruthlessly embedded in a Psychobilly song.

Back to nostalgia. People in my past are almost uniformly psychos. I'm perfectly normal, of course. The last crazy thing I did, which was driving my Golf into a fountain while blitz-drunk on Costa Rican rum, pretty much cured me of the whole "Gotta be crazy to enjoy life" frame of thinking. Since then, I've pretty much just used my friends, all of whom are raving moonbats, to live my craziness out for me and, on a per-case basis, take the rap.

Honestly, I have absolutely no desire whatever to be crazy. I once wrote the following paragraph to a prospective girlfriend:

When I was younger, a girl left me who I really liked. It didn't hurt at all. She was there one day, and then she was gone the next. That simple. She was beautiful, rich. She had long brown hair and light blue eyes. She was intelligent, too. I took a box-cutter and slashed my forearms to ribbons one day, blood everywhere. The old saying: If you can feel pain, you can still feel. I had to wear long sleeves for two months. Unfortunately, it was May, a hot month in atlanta to be moving around in long sleeves. Didn't fool anybody though; they'd seen it. A friend of mine called it, 6 years later, my "ritual scarification period". I still have a couple of pretty good scars from that.

The strange thing was, I was screaming-meemies drunk when I wrote that. I mean, it's absolutely true, but I totally forgot that I'd written it. About a year later, the recipient mentioned off-hand that she'd noticed I had scars on my arm, and sorta played dumb about where they were from. Weird.

Anyways, if you go to this page, the particular babe who inspired this act of self-mutilation is the first picture. A doll, no?

This brings us to the present, I guess. And not in too particular straight of a line. I remember back in '99, when I was home for the first time after a 2-year stint on the road. I'd moved to Europe in 1997, and travelled through the south Pacific and southeast Asia, and finally come home. I was tired. Very tired. But there was one night, I was in bed, looking up at a map of the world. I was so happy just to be home. It was August, and hot hot hot. There were big spiders everywhere and mosquitoes outside. I was smoking a cigarette and staring at the map of Germany, of central Europe. I wanted to cry. What was it that had taken me there, and then to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia of all places? And why had it brought me home, only to be unhappy? I wanted the old times back. Either the old times at home, or the old times in Europe, or Australia. Anytime but now.

Why? Because it's not real. Real sucks. Real means work. But real is the gateway to the future. My future is bright, I figure. Ok, I don't figure it is, but I have to use that as my starting point, or I might as well start drinking myself to death right now. Maybe I should stop listening to all this country music...

Women. I love women. I love the way they smell. I love the way they look. I love the way the feel when you curl up with one and go to sleep. I'm a leg-man, in case you're interested. Actually, I'm a nape-man, but most women have good napes. At some point, you have to make a stand and cut down the selection.

Women are beautiful. I don't mean the whole "life-bearing", "nurturing" beautiful thing. I mean legs, asses, napes, and tits beautiful. There really is nothing like dancing with a girl who knows how to shake that thang. The problem is, if you let anyone get under your skin, especially a woman, you're fucked. And not in a good way. They suck everything out of you. Your energy, your happiness, your independence, your freedom, your VERY SOUL. So, no matter how good it feels when they're sucking that dick, or how cool it is when they grab your head and you're eatin' that pussy, screamin' your name in some foreign language, you have to realize they're saving it all up to stab you in the back with later. Every disgusting, depraved, kinky act that you commit upon that poor woman will eventually show up on an internet page. Much like the film you made of it with the "defunct" digital camera sitting on the dresser, heh.

People are evil, and women are no exception. In fact, if any of the world's religions are to be believed, they're actually the inspiration.

A psychosexual Ludovico treatment, perhaps? Hurting people to see if they still feel? An emotional gamma-knife for that part of the brain that still gave a goddamn? Jesus, what a mind-fuck.

Sometimes after a good night's sleep, you wake up alive. You spring out of bed, hit the coffee-maker, take a shower, brush your teeth, put on some energetic music, think excitedly about what this week will bring.

Then you check your weather applet.

Feh. Europe sucks.

UPDATE:

Of course, it doesn't get anybetter when you change your settings to home.

Sigh.

Welp, he best part about having your own web site is the ability to snoop through the logs, spying on your visitors as they innocently drift through the Internet,looking for pictures of drunk men, or Jon Ritter.

Here, with numbers blanked out to hide my pathetic traffic statistics, is my otherwise unabridged Webalyzer search analysis.

The most interesting search has to be number 17. I'm really curious to find out exactly what page they found with that search string. I'll have to do some dumpster-diving to get it, though.

A year ago, I wrote some off-hand stuff about the French intrusion in the Ivory Coast. I hate it when I'm so right.

EU Politicians: These are the world's worst hypocrites. They concern themselves so much with american politics that they have no idea what's going on at home. The blackouts in the USA and Canada were huge news over here, but the even-bigger blackouts in Italy and France were hardly even covered. As were the 13,000+ deaths in France during that horrible 85-degree heat wave over the summer. Sure, it was in the news. You could find it on page 2, right after the story called "USA: Buried in a Hot Sandy Hell".

It's kind of sad really. People here rely on the US for entertainment, escape, and self-worth. They absolutely can't stand it when the US does something that's beyond their control, e.g. Iraq. In a way, they revel in bashing Americans the same way that failed writers revel in being snarky book critics. It's so much easier to feel better about yourself by harping on other people than it is to actually make yourself better.

There's also a drama factor, of course. Iraq was a big, dramatic, momentous event, as was 9/11. Small, ugly things like France's vicious crackdown in the Ivory Coast, which has been running since last year and there's no end in sight, are not good news for Europeans. They don't want to see it. They want to read about the latest follies of those magna nova americans.

Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude, as the saying goes. Euros need to get their heads out of their asses and take a look at their own problems. The Ivory Coast is spiralling out of control, and will be a wasteland before long. There are hundreds of thousands of refugees, a looming famine, and rising Islamist radicalism.

Just don't come crying to us for help: We just might give it, and make you look like the post-Imperialist weaklings you really are.

Roy, of famous german entertainment act Siegfried and Roy, has been attacked by his tiger, which dragged him off-stage by his throat, and is in the hospital.

Well, they don't look so tough to me in this picture.

I've now been klinikally diaknost, by a Dokter no les, as bean totally inkompentent.

IP Address: 212.242.63.9 Name: Doc. Alan Barmby Email Address: Alan@hotmail.com URL:

Comments:

you are totally inkompentent.....

Firstly, 'Doc', you're an idiot. Second, you can't spell. Third, you can't debate. Fourth, you present your ideas like a three year old. Fifth, you shouldn't use big words if you can neither spell nor understand them. Sixth, there are only three dots in an ellipsis, not five. Seventh, I don't believe for a minute that's your real email address. And finally, if you're a doctor, you can afford a real newspaper instead of slumming around private bloggers' pages. Unless, of course, the communist medical system in Denmark doesn't actually pay doctors, which may be the case.

Responses forthcoming?

The Iraqi representative to the UN, Ahmad Chalabi, spoke before the General Assembly today:

I stand in front of you today representing the voice of the Iraqi citizen who has long suffered from cruelty within and outside his homeland. Those within his country have inflicted on him the worst kinds of torture: they have attacked his honour, betrayed his family, humiliated him, enchained him and thrown him into miserable wars...And throughout the world, those that stood to benefit scrambled to trade and work with his torturer. ... To those who stood with the dictator and who continue to question the intentions of the American and British governments in undertaking this liberation, we invite you to come and visit the mass graves where half a million of our citizens lie, come and visit the dried up marshes, come and visit Halabja where chemicals were dropped on civilians, come and examine the lists of the disappeared whose right to live was taken away from them by Saddam Hussein. And we the Iraqi people will ask you why you chose to remain silent.

Whew! I'm glad I was for the war. If nothing else, there was a fight on and I wasn't on the side of people like Osama and Saddam. Or Schroeder or Chirac, for that matter. Often, with complicated issues, you can take a page from Occam's notebook and judge the issue by the participants. If you get dragged into a fight and don't truly understand the conflict, just look at who's fighting and make your decision based on that.

I have to wonder if people like the 3 stooges above have a twinge in their conscience when they read stuff like this. Or if they just roll their eyes, sniff derisively through their pointy, long noses, and wonder themselves when these silly little brown people will stop thinking and start listening to their colonial masters again.

(Thanks, Amish Tech Support)

No Blood for Trabbis!

Thirteen years after the "liberation" of East Germany, when it was proclaimed that major hostilities in the Cold War were over, Germans still find themselves wondering if the occupation and "reconstruction" of the once-independent state will ever end. Spiralling costs, popular resistance, and political pressure on the homefront have plagued Gerhard Schrder, and have people speaking of corruption and a possible confidence vote, says one source at an independent international watchdog organization.

According to Interpol, an independent international watchdog organization, more than 2,200 people were killed in German-occupied territories in 2002, 12 years after hostilities were offically declared ended.

Speaking today in occupied Magdeburg, Schroeder tried to silence critics of the Germans' unilateral takeover of East Germany, saying "together we must find the way to bring harmony, economic prosperity, social cohesion, and justice."

The country remains deeply divided on the issue of East Germany. www.mgb-home.de, an independent international watchdog organization, says of the lengthy occupation, "the word held and 1994 off from Germany took." Further, the site states, "Who comes too late, punishes the life!"

It is to laugh!

As we speak, friends and neighbors, the shite is hitting the fan in a big way about 1000 miles to my right, at the World Climate Conference in Russia. In an astonishing turn of furriner politickin', my newest bestest buddy, Vlad "the Impaler" Putin, is nixing the Kyoto Protocol as an (gasp!) alarmist, opportunist, economically disastrous bit of power-politics out of the goofier corners of Europe. Et Tu, Vladimir?

Basically, the Russkis are going to tell us that global warming is a myth, unsupported by any competent scientific studies, and is being used as a hammer by the also-rans of the world (read "France, Germany, Canada, etc.") to clobber people who actually produce stuff and still have an economic future to worry about.

Now, it may very well be that the meeting between Bush and Putin last week had something to do with this. Although you may not know it from reading the papers, Bush isn't the only Tree-Hating Nazi who didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Australia and Japan both waffled, and Russia was still holding back on signing it. Things are bad enough there, economically speaking, without having to retrofit the entire infrastructure to satisfy spit Greenpeace spit. So big bad Vlad decides against it, and has Russian scientists galore to debunk the entire global warming hysteria to boot.

But all is not to be taken at face value, to put it mildly. Putin was also quoted as saying "In Russia, you often hear, either as a joke or seriously, that Russia is a northern country and it would not be scary for it to be two or three degrees warmer. Maybe it would be good and we could spend less on fur coats and other warm things".

Having been in Europe for about 4 years now, and twice having seen snow on April 19th, I couldn't agree more.

(links via Instapundit)

Edmund Stoiber was the guy who lost the election to Gerhard Schrder last November.

If you recall, Schrder, along with his troll-like, two-faced little minion Joschka Fischer, ran on a strong anti-US/Strong EU/Pro-Third World Dictator/Good old Days of Communism ticket. Apparently, this just excited the Germans all the more, as the subsequent success of Soviet-era nostalgia items, and films such as "Goodbye, Lenin", has shown. This is in keeping with Schrders general politics, being the head of the german socialist party, and Fischer's as well, he being a tree-hugging Green.

Stoiber is a member of the CSU, which is the Christian party. The CSU is much less socialist and hippie as the Red/Green coalition. For example, they don't back the nightmarish "Dosenpfand" that is currently wreaking havoc in Germany. This is crazy: When you buy food or drinks in disposable containers, you actually have to pay a deposit on it. If you buy a beer, for example, you pay 15 cents per bottle or can, then you have to keep your receipt and take it back to the same place you bought it from. It makes absolutely no sense. It's bad for business, as well. I know that I refrain from buying things in disposable containers. I buy about half as much beer as I used to, finding it much easier to drink in a bar than it is to keep up with millions of receipts, and matching them to the correct bottles to take back. Some things should just be thrown away.

But this isn't about how silly and misguided the Reds and Greens are, it's about what would happen if the leader of a Christian political party in the states got his picture taken in this situation:

That would be awesome!

Drums, Horns & A Nazi Flag

What the hell was this guy thinking? On Rosh Hashana, his band played the German National Anthem, which is musically identical to Nazi Germany's, while one of his students ran across the field with a swastika flag. It was performance art, apparently, expressing the power-struggles of the Holocaust years. He meant to honor Jews.

A rule of thumb: Try to use swastikas sparingly when trying to honor Jews.

SPD-Kandidat Maget: Trost vom Kanzler

What, exactly, is going on here?

(pic from IMDB)

I feel kind of bad that I'm not seeing more news about John Ritter dying. I did think he was cool when I was a kid, watching him living in a sexy, quirky, kinky pseudo-homosexual menage-a-trois with two hot chicks, Chrissy and Janet, on "Three's Company".

It was a horrible show in retrospect, but then again, I was only seven years old when it came out. It never occured to me (really!) that every single show had the exact same plotline. In that respect, it was just like Gilligan's Island. Only worse.

It also never hit me as odd that, even though he was playing a straight man doing over-the-top nancy-boy queer-schtick half the time, and an over-the-top sex-crazed prat-falling chef's-hat wearing 70's slimeball the other half of the time, he still managed to get upstaged by Suzanne Somers.

I'm not putting him down. I really think he was a talented actor, and every now and then you saw it come through, even in some really horrifyingly bad career choices. He was great as the soft-spoken devil in Wholly Moses, for example, an otherwise bone-chillingly bad movie populated almost exclusively with unimaginative, bored-looking cardboard cutouts (Richard Pryor being the other exception). And of course, he played the only even halfway sympathetic character in the amazingly over-wrought and overrated Sling Blade. He also seemed pretty genuine in that old Blake Edwards movie, Skin Deep, though I don't have the patience to link to it.

He probably got screwed by the runaway success of Three's Company for the rest of his life. He had the looks and the talent, but didn't really get the respect.

It's been a tough year for entertainers.

Ok, this is old, but I just can't sleep. I captured this from The Telegraph right at the beginning of the Iraq War.

It still makes me chuckle.