A two-inch toy rifle, designed to be shouldered by a G.I. Joe doll, was confiscated at LAX.

A spokesman for Los Angeles International Airport said: “We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.”

“If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him.”

I’m starting to wonder if the Bush Administration’s acquiescence in the federalization of airport security was a rope-a-dope ploy, knowing that imbecilities like this would eventually destroy all public support for it.

It’s actually a kind of gruesome story. I wonder if she was on top?

Jim Oberg posts:

A month ago, Lance Bass’s promoters purchased four weeks of spaceflight training for him, from the Gagarin Center at Star City (in a deal that Klimuk would sell to anybody for a price of about $100,000 or so). That training interval has now ended — there was supposed to be a zero-G airplane flight over the weekend, but no word that it happened. Last week, also, word from Moscow was that the Bass team needed to pay a first down payment of $1.5 million to continue preparing for the Soyuz mission in October. But as of the ‘final’ due date last Friday, there was no word except that maybe it would happen ‘next Monday’ (this, from CNN). There are no reports that it has happened today (Monday). Does this mean the money has run out, and all we have left are more promises? When — if ever — will we see any proof that the project can afford the REAL cost of the flight?

Time is running short, and it does appear, amidst all of the rumors, that the tactics are aimed at buying time. On the other hand, there have also been rumors that a second sponsor has been lined up, along with Radio Shack, to be announced today. We’ll see shortly.

The desire of the press to rehabilitate the Clinton Administration is apparently boundless. Now Reuters is reporting that the Bush transition team was given a plan to deal with Al Qaeda that the incoming administration ignored.

How is it that, if the Clinton Administration had such a wonderful plan, they weren’t implementing it themselves? Why were they waiting for the Bush Administration to come in?

This is Bravo Sierra.

Hey, anybody remember that nuclear war we were about to have in south Asia a few weeks ago? It’s not even on the media radar screen any more.

Blogging is light because I’m building a computer out of spare parts for my niece, who’s starting USC in the fall. I had a motherboard that I thought was recent enough to not cause problems (a Diamond Multimedia Micronics C200, vintage 1998, an ATX form factor, with a 350 MHz AMD K6-2), but the BIOS couldn’t recognize hard drives larger than thirty-two gig.

(“Why would anyone ever need more than 640K of RAM?” –Bill Gates, c. 1981)

So I had to flash the BIOS with a more recent version. Problem is, in order to do that, the instructions are to boot with a DOS floppy. I’m no longer running any Windows versions older than W2K, and W2K will not create an old-style DOS bootable floppy–the old “/s” parameter is no longer recognized when floppies are formatted.

I looked around for some old DOS boot disks, but they seemed to be too old to read. So now I know that most of these floppies I’ve been hanging on to for years to preserve the data have really only been preserving dust.

What to do?

I dug out an old Toshiba laptop (state of the art and a couple thousand bucks new, about eight years ago). I can’t even put Linux on it–it’s got barely enough RAM (4 meg), but the hard drive is “only” 200 meg (which was a pretty decent sized drive in a laptop in the early nineties). But it does boot into DOS, and even Windows 3.1.

I plugged in the power supply (the battery had given up the ghost years ago), and fired it up. It booted, though it didn’t seem to recognize the trackball. I managed to navigate to a DOS window with the keyboard from Win 3.1. I formatted a system disk, and voila, took it over to the machine under construction and flashed the BIOS.

It now sees the forty-gig drive, and I’m in business. Now I’m just trying to decide whether to install Gatesware, or do a free RH 7.3 installation. I’m tempted to do the latter, to see how well it installs out of the box for a workstation, and how friendly it will be to a freshman college student.

So, off again…

Here’s one European who sees through Yasir (that’s my exploding baby) Arafat:

My distinguished media colleagues in Europe just lap him up. Arafat, who attracts journalists like a lamp-post attracts dogs, gave the world the Pissoir Syndrome. When he appeared before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in 1988, I was not surprised that the delegates rose to applaud him. You expect that from diplomats. But that evening, arriving three hours late for a press conference in the UN building, I was shocked that all my colleagues gave him a whooping, standing ovation. Here, surely, was a boy band?s lead singer meeting the fans, rather than a terrorist leader about to renounce terrorism.

Here’s one European who sees through Yasir (that’s my exploding baby) Arafat:

My distinguished media colleagues in Europe just lap him up. Arafat, who attracts journalists like a lamp-post attracts dogs, gave the world the Pissoir Syndrome. When he appeared before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in 1988, I was not surprised that the delegates rose to applaud him. You expect that from diplomats. But that evening, arriving three hours late for a press conference in the UN building, I was shocked that all my colleagues gave him a whooping, standing ovation. Here, surely, was a boy band?s lead singer meeting the fans, rather than a terrorist leader about to renounce terrorism.

Here’s one European who sees through Yasir (that’s my exploding baby) Arafat:

My distinguished media colleagues in Europe just lap him up. Arafat, who attracts journalists like a lamp-post attracts dogs, gave the world the Pissoir Syndrome. When he appeared before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in 1988, I was not surprised that the delegates rose to applaud him. You expect that from diplomats. But that evening, arriving three hours late for a press conference in the UN building, I was shocked that all my colleagues gave him a whooping, standing ovation. Here, surely, was a boy band?s lead singer meeting the fans, rather than a terrorist leader about to renounce terrorism.

There’s a little photoshop contest running at this site, playing games with that now-famous picture of Jesse Jackson and Yasir (that’s my exploding baby) Arafat.

Here’s my entry (actually, it’s Allouette’s from Free Republic), that I’ve combined with another recent favorite. (Hope it counts if I used the Gimp instead of Photoshop…).

Enjoy.

[Via Charles Johnson]

[No pixels were killed or injured in the production of this spoof photograph]