…are being cruelly mocked. By the cruelest mocker of all, Mark Steyn.
…other celebrities rushed to show their support for the anti-war movement: ”I’ll not have what she’s not having.” Winona Ryder is telling waiters, ”Hold the haunch of venison.” Keira Knightley is saying, ”Hey, I’ll just go with the short stack this morning. And the low-fat simulated-maple syrup substitute.” Ice T has given up iced tea. Disgusted by the callousness of the Bush war machine, William Powell and Myrna Loy have decided to go without the olive in their fourth martini. Willie Nelson is said to be gaunt and sounding croaky. Michael Moore, hovering dangerously at 300 pounds, has told friends, ”You can never be too rich but you can be too thin.”
[Update in the afternoon]
People magazine, of course, reports this as though it were a real hunger strike. Would it hurt them to point out that no one, in fact, is going to be truly hungry, at any point of this laugh fest?
Mohammad El-Baradei’s capitulation to Iran has made huge waves at the IAEA in Vienna. The other inspectors are up in arms. “This totally bankrupts our work” says a Viennese inspector. “Mohammad El-Baradei folds vis-a-vis the Mullahs and leaves us standing in the rain. Why don’t we just let Iran be in charge of inspecting their own nuclear program?”
It will be interesting to see what kind of logical pretzels they warp themselves into to explain why this is unfair, when unmarried heterosexual couples don’t get benefits. I also wonder what Andrew Sullivan thinks? Not enough to actually link to him, though.
Some amusing comments. I don’t mind clowns all that much, myself. But mimes–that’s a different story. I’m not a violent person, generally, but they make me want to take a bat to them.
Mojave seems to be recovering from the construction of the Highway 58 bypass:
In four years, Mojave Airport has gone from an under-utilized airport and civilian flight test facility to a spaceport with a worldwide reputation as a “Silicon Valley” for the emerging commercial space industry.
New companies are arriving and established tenants are seeing their contracts and payrolls grow.
Companies such as Scaled Composites – which won international acclaim for SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded, manned space program – and XCOR Aerospace are among the cutting-edge aerospace firms outgrowing their existing facilities as they add employees and projects.
I recently got a call from Chase left on my answering machine telling me to call an 800 number and have my credit card available to authenticate myself. The trouble is, they didn’t authenticate themselves. Anyone could have made that call to me and if I did what the call said, I would be giving my credit card number (and probably the date, secret code and every else they asked me) to a bad actor. I authenticated them by dialing the number on the back of my card, but I worry that there will be a smart confidence man who will figure this out before the rest of the world figures out how to stop leaving openings.
I also received two calls about my “Virgin lottery territory” piece that Buzz Aldrin liked. Two other people called because they received checks from a “Virgin Lottery” that didn’t cash, they searched for that on the web and my article and phone number came up. Never mind that my article dealt with the 17th century lottery that helped fund Virginia colonization, they thought I might know something about modern fraud.
Lileks is kind of tough on the politically correct naifs who castrated the most recent Superman film:
“We were always hesitant to include the term `American way’ because the meaning of that today is somewhat uncertain,” said co-writer Michael Dougherty. “I think when people say `American way,’ they’re actually
talking about what the `American way’ meant back in the ’40s and ’50s, which was something more noble and idealistic.”
Ah. Of course. Well, in the ’40s, the American Way included incinerating German cities, nuking Japan, installing occupying armies with remnants to this day, and imposing our form of government — all the while referring to the enemy with hurtful ethnic slurs. All this plus forced relocation. If these actions are deemed noble and idealistic now, it’ll be a handy sentiment the next time the U.S. gears up for total war.
But the inconstant left doesn’t believe any of this is permissible in the service of a noble goal. The right, after all, can’t lead the war on terror because they don’t “walk the walk” on human rights: witness those POWs slaving away in the cane fields of Gitmo. Unless we lead by example, no one will choose the American Way. Never mind that the internment of the Japanese didn’t keep the Germans — or the Japanese, for that matter — from following our example after World War II. (Note to the dense: The above is not an endorsement of internment. Just a reminder of which party has more practice.)
There is more than one way to extend the total work and leisure enjoyed during one’s life. In addition to living longer, one can sleep less if it doesn’t degrade the rest of the hours. Not too much research on the latter. Here’s a gem in this week’s Economist; the good news:
With the help of Chiara Cirelli, who also works at the University of Wisconsin, Dr Tononi has created a mutant fruit fly that sleeps only two or three hours a night. (A normal fly sleeps between eight and 14 hours.)
The bad news:
…though the mutant fly is capable of learning things, it forgets them within minutes. Healthy flies retain learned information for hours or even days.
Would you trade your memory like in Johnny Mnemonic, Memento or Paycheck for an extra six hours every day? It’s like living an extra 25 years.