Check this out. Those crazy Japanese.

Think Geek has a funny feature on their site. They ask people to take a survey which contains the standard demographic info (for geeks… age, favorite OS, favorite computer activity, etc.). They also have an open text box that you can submit any comments to the site. Well, they have a place that you can view the responses. It’s pretty amusing what some people will write.

So my friend Steve and I were discussing books this weekend — ones we’ve read and liked (me: Driving Mr. Albert and The Mind’s I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Steve: The Years of Rice and Salt, both of us: House of Leaves), and books we plan to read (me: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, both of us: The Da Vinci Code). Which lead me to my new year’s resolution: start reading for pleasure again on a regular basis. To help me with this, I was wondering what other good books people had read, or were planning to read.

Attack of the killer Santa Clauses at an Islanders game. Or should I have called it Trojan Santas?

Here. Get into the ’spirit’ of the season. Bake some cookies:

Jose Cuervo Christmas Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup of water
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup of brown sugar
lemon juice
4 large eggs
1 cup nuts
2 cups of dried fruit
1 bottle Jose Cuervo Tequilla

Sample the Cuervo to check quality.
Take a large bowl, check the Cuervo
again, to be sure it is of the highest
quality, pour one level cup and drink.

Turn on the electric mixer…Beat one
cup of butter till light and fluffy.
Add one teaspoon of sugar…Beat again.
At this point it’s best to make sure the
Cuervo is still OK, try another cup …
just in case.

Turn off the mixerer thingy. Break 2
leggs and add to the bowl and chuck in
the cup of dried fruit, Pick the
frigging fruit off floor… Mix on the
turner. If the fried druit gets stuck
in the beaterers just pry it loose with
a drewscriver. Sample the Cuervo to
check for tonsisticity.

Next, sift two cups of salt, or
something. Who giveshz a sheet. Check
the Jose Cuervo. Now shift the lemon
juice and strain your nuts. Add one
table. Add a spoon of sugar, or
somefink. Whatever you can find. Greash
the oven.

Turn the cake tin 360 degrees
and try not to fall over. Don’t forget
to beat off the turner. Finally, throw
the bowl through the window, finish the
Cose Juervo and make sure to put the stove in the
dishwasher.

CHERRY MISTMAS!

I mean, seriously! Why do we support these people!?!?

A female lobster crawling around off the Maine coast has cheated death at least 10 times, thanks to Barbie and a couple of Mount Desert fishermen. Read all about it.

Here ya go. The pope. Direct to you. On your phone. Yay!

Now, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Here’s a different version of an old holiday song.
Here you have it: walking round in women’s underwear

This is absolutely hilarious. It’s even funnier if you’re a law student or a lawyer (or are around enough of the above to understand the lingo). You could also call this, “When Law and Lord of the Rings Collide.”

Just in time for the recently announced Code Orange, and following up on our ’80’s cereal thread , it’s the General Mills Terror Chart. But Count Chocula is way more scarry than Frankenberry…

So watch this movie. And then sign the petition

BBC article on Somalian imams calling for a ban on condoms.
Does it seem like there’s a conspiracy of total dunderheads in charge, all over the world?? Sheesh!

This is a fun game in the erm, spirit of the season Use your arrow keys to get him his drinkies and try to avoid being hit. You might have to eat some cup cakes on the way. mmm. burp.

and here’s a tamer kind of mayhem.

Some interesting passages in this week’s Economist leader. The first is some history about our last involvement in Iraq (and why both Saddam sympathizers and opposition might have trouble trusting the U.S.):

In 1990, the first President Bush handled Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with exemplary skill. He spent five months assembling a grand alliance, then commanded a swift war with the authority of a united Security Council. It is fashionable now to criticise him for not going on to Baghdad to finish Saddam off, but this is the wisdom of hindsight. At the time, many voices (including The Economist’s) urged Mr Bush not to exceed his UN mandate, which was only to rescue Kuwait. He (and we) reckoned there was a good chance that a humbled Saddam would fall anyway. Sending an American army to conquer a great Arab capital did not look like a splendid idea. But that honest mistake was tainted by what happened next. Mr Bush called on Iraqis to rise up, only to turn away when those who did were slaughtered in a bloodbath America could have halted.

The second passage sums up some of what I’ve been saying pretty well.

History will record that Bush the younger, basking at present in the dictator’s capture, has collected his own store of failure to set against the triumphs. He too conducted a swift war. But his pre-war diplomacy was less deft than his father’s and his planning for the post-war occupation rudimentary. America went to war on what appears now to have been weak or false intelligence, which the Bush team exaggerated, about Saddam’s forbidden weapons. In fact, the case for war did not have to be stretched this way. Saddam was a serial aggressor who had refused for more than a decade to prove beyond doubt that he had disarmed in accordance with the ceasefire that followed his expulsion from Kuwait.

Mr Bush has made matters worse by continuing to portray Iraq as part and parcel of the war against al-Qaeda. Although this simplification may play in Peoria (not to mention in the presidential election), it is wrong. Yes, Saddam terrorised his people and his neighbours. But to lump all America’s enemies together as “terrorists” is to play with words and, worse, to risk making a muddle of policy. Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic with an apocalyptic vision of permanent Islamic war against the infidel. Saddam is a secular Arab nationalist who had a rational if reckless dream of acquiring super-weapons and dominating the world’s oil reserves. Saddam had to be stopped, but his defeat has not necessarily hastened the defeat of al-Qaeda, and might even make victory harder if it continues to stoke up Muslim rage against the West.

Summary: Saddam != al-Qaeda thus stopping Saddam doesn’t necessarily do anything to or against al-Qaeda. Any attempt to link the two “is wrong.”

I do also have to point out one other comment, which I hope the potential next Presidents remember when considering their Iraq policy (this means you, Howard Dean):

Will America’s occupation of Iraq continue to inflame Muslims? Perhaps it will, but it is needlessly despairing to say that it must.

It may have started poorly, but it doesn’t mean that it should end worse. We’re there now (stupid Bush). Let’s make sure we leave with a better situation in Iraq than there is now.

Check out some of the ads at Bush in 30 Seconds. While I like “Follow the Leader,” I’m not sure that it would really appeal to many outside the core Democratic/Leftist constituency.

For a non-baseball fan I seem to be posting alot about baseball. Although, I must say, Lupica makes a number of good points here. There is absolutely no reason for the union to be standing in the way of this. This is just yet another example of all the problems baseball has.

Owning a car is definitely more annoying than it’s worth. Last night, on my way home from watching LOTR: ROTK, my windshield cracked along the bottom. The crack followed the pattern of airflow coming out of the defroster, leading me to believe that turning on my defroster full blast was a bad idea.

After talking to the folks at the glass place and looking online, car windows can actually crack from the temperature differential between the heat blowing on the inside and the outside. The glass place said they see a few of those every winter. In my case, I think something may have triggered the crack (there was a small pit along the crack and I was going by a truck when this happened… they kick up rocks all the time). What sucked even more is that it burned my entire day today to try to get it fixed. The earliest someone could come out to work or my apartment to fix it was Monday. The crack was large enough (and making enough creaking noises) that I didn’t trust the windshield if anything else were to hit it or if I got into an accident. So, I drove out to a glass place recommended by my dealer to get it fixed. Unfortunately, they had a mixup and only had a replacement windshield that was already scratched. They rushed a new one from their supplier which they thought would be there in 30 minutes to an hour. It took more like 2 hours.

The only good thing was that I found a nice pizza place in Thornton, CT. And charming places like the diner pictured here.

This diner was recommended to me by the staff at the glass place. I saw the sign attached to the main diner sign and immediately crossed the street to the pizzeria across the street. Spent an hour plus at the pizza place, then spent another couple of hours at the glass place.

Heidi gave me Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, a book on baseball by the late Stephen Jay Gould. Triumph is a collection of essays by Gould, some new for the book and some that have appeared in newspapers and other books. The book has been a fascinating read so far, as he is able to convey what it is to be a baseball fan. Worth a read if you love baseball or want to understand what it is to love baseball.

The book is an easy read in part because they are essays. It’s easy to read an essay and put it down because they are self-contained. The variety also keeps things fresh. One essay might be about Mantle (did you know he had an on-base percentage of .512 in 1957?!) while the next will talk about steroids in baseball. Another talks about variations of stickball in 50’s New York. The next might talk about batting averages over time. Triumph is a great mix of the human, the mundane, and the geeky.

This is Gould on watching Game 7 of the 1986 World Series with his son, Ethan.

The finale was too typical — an early Sox lead, eroded near the end; a late Sox surge, almost but not quite enough. Ethan cried when it was all over — and this was only his first time. I tried to console him, but ended up joining him. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? I don’t know why grown men care so deeply about something that neither kills, nor starves, nor maims, nor even scratches in our world of woe. I don’t know why we care so much, but I’m mighty glad that we do.

Another semi-baseball related quote:

Mantle also taught me something very special: the universality of excellence. We intellectuals, in our crass parochialism, often imagine that scholars succeed only by a struggle of long years devoted to study but that athletes triumph by untutored skill — the pain of brain versus the gift of brawn. But if I have learned anything from studying the lives of great ballplayers, Mantle’s in particular, I have come to understand the common denominator of human excellence. The potential must be present (and we do not all possess it), but the universal agents of realization are passion to the point of obsession combined with hard, unrelenting work. All achievers are kinsmen in a tough and crowded world.

I do not seek moral lessons from my sports heroes. The thrill of witnessing rare excellence will suffice.

Great stuff.

http://bojack.org/mt-arc/000334.html

Bill Maher notes that a blind man went hunting and shot his first deer. I love Bill’s comment. Go read it.

Not quite as good as Gollum Raps, but check out Monster in a Wheelchair.

Against my better judgment, I’m watching Diane Sawyer’s interview of George W. Bush on ABC right now (hail to the Mother Ship, hail Disney ). It’s actually fascinating to watch Bush absolutely struggle with any explanation of why we went to war. His responses to Diane Sawyer’s repeated hypothetical, “What if they don’t have WMD?” questions are even more telling… He just repeated that he did the right thing for the American people. No explanation. Nothing else. No token, “I’m sure that we’ll find further evidence of WMD programs.” I’ll post excerpts of the transcript as soon as I have a copy.

He also isn’t a better speaker than he was at the start of the Presidency. I have to believe (though don’t know for certain) that he knew what the questions were ahead of time (a pretty standard thing to do). Even with that preparation, he was awkward, simplistic, and, well, un-presidential.

He did say some interesting things about Saddam Hussein’s trial. It seems that they want the new Iraqi government to try Saddam. It was an interesting suggestion. Again, more on this when I get a hold of the transcript (I would prefer not to misquote our august leader).

Update: OK, here’s the passage I’m talking about regarding WMD (full transcript, edited to take out Bush’s trademark pauses/”uh’s”/etc. is on the ABC News site)

DIANE SAWYER:   Again, I’m just trying to ask, these are supporters, people who believed in the war who have asked the question.

PRESIDENT BUSH:   Well, you can keep asking the question and my answer’s gonna be the same. Saddam was a danger and the world is better off cause we got rid of him.

DIANE SAWYER:   But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still –

PRESIDENT BUSH:   So what’s the difference?

DIANE SAWYER:   Well –

PRESIDENT BUSH:   The possibility that he could acquire weapons. If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger. That’s, that’s what I’m trying to explain to you. A gathering threat, after 9/11, is a threat that needed to be de — dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying the man’s a danger. And so we got rid of him and there’s no doubt the world is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam being gone.

DIANE SAWYER:   But, but, again, some, some of the critics have said this combined with the failure to establish proof of, of elaborate terrorism contacts, has indicated that there’s just not precision, at best, and misleading, at worst.

PRESIDENT BUSH:   Yeah. Look — what — what we based our evidence on was a very sound National Intelligence Estimate. …

DIANE SAWYER:   Nothing should have been more precise?

PRESIDENT BUSH:   What — I, I — I made my decision based upon enough intelligence to tell me that this country was threatened with Saddam Hussein in power.

DIANE SAWYER:   What would it take to convince you he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction?

PRESIDENT BUSH:   Saddam Hussein was a threat and the fact that he is gone means America is a safer country.

DIANE SAWYER:   And if he doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction [inaudible] ?

PRESIDENT BUSH:   Diane, you can keep asking the question. I’m telling you — I made the right decision for America –

DIANE SAWYER:   But-

PRESIDENT BUSH:   — because Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction, invaded Kuwait. … But the fact that he is not there is, means America’s a more secure country.

Not even a subtle evasion of the question… I would point out that his “So what’s the difference” comment is pretty much the same as Clinton’s hand waving about not having sexual relations with Lewinsky. I sure as hell hope that people that voted against Gore because of Clinton’s comments remember this comment and vote against Bush in 2004. They may also want to remember the push polls, the ongoing investigation in Cheney’s arrogant violation of the law, and Bush’s used-car sales tactics with great sounding legislation that doesn’t work.

This is not a President who “is a uniter, not a divider.” He is not a compassionate anything. He has presided over the most dramatic reduction in civil liberties and due process in the history of the United States (the Miami police responsible for the broad violence against protesters during the FTAA meeting were given funding by a rider attached to the Iraq reconstruction bill). There’s also the massive deficit (which might be smaller had we not gone to war against Iraq alone), made worse by huge tax cuts.

Vote him out in 2004.

Further update: Common Cause has a list of donors and the perks they received from the 2000 campaign. They also highlight how much money Bush has raised even though he has no primary opponent. Finally, the Bush campaign is kind enough to provide a list of donors to the 2004 campaign. The highest individual donor is listed at $10,000. This doesn’t count the Pioneers and Rangers group, of course.

From craigslist, a random posting that made me laugh. I was just going to email it to some people, but decided y’all are mature enough to find it funny, too

BBC article on how some people just want to vote.

Salon has a rather scary article about police reactions to the recent FTAA protests in Miami…

Strom Thurmond holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history, over 24 hours, in opposition to civil rights legislation. His past (CNN report) is filled with positions on both sides of minority rights.

New information has come out about his youth. As a 22 year old, living in his parents’ house, he had a child with a 16 year old African American maid. The girl was spirited away to live with an aunt, and didn’t meet Thurmond until she was 16.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/12/15/thurmond..paternity/index.html

It turns out, unknown to me, there is an annual Boston Santa Speedo Run down Newbury street in Boston. Who knew? Sujal, you are really missing out not living in Boston anymore

I am now in a massive state of confusion. What do I need more? The Hello Kitty toaster or the Toast-R-Shredder. The best feature of the Toast-R-Shredder:

Smoke exhaust hole features replaceable toast-odor filter

OMG!!!!
this is f***ing brrrrrrillliant.