I try very hard to make sure of my facts, for they inform my opinions and I don't like being wrong, not a bit. And when I publish something I realize that I'm setting myself up for rotten vegetables to be thrown at me, but I also hope that I'm a big enough man to admit it when I'm wrong.

Last night I was cooking a steak and heard a ruckus in the other room where Calvin and Hobbes, the cats, sounded as though I would soon be with one cat rather than two. When I got back, the steak had burned itself.

I realized that I had left a large carbon footprint, and then the waves of remorse swept over me: not only had I burned perfectly good animal muscle and turned it into carbon, but the animals themselves had taken in oxygen and emitted carbon dioxide! The feeders who had raised the animals had used vehicles driven by hydrocarbons, and the processing of them had released carbon into the air.

And the animals themselves had been raised on vegetables and grain--and I know that they take in carbon dioxide and through Gaia's miracle of photosynthesis, emit oxygen. But they too are tended with gas-guzzling vehicles, and I have no doubt that the ranchers themselves have bits of plastic in their pockets or in their houses and there go the hydrocarbons again.

What can I do? Animal flesh is out. Grains and vegetables are out. And even breathing is out, for I'm using oxygen that someone better than I am, which is everyone, you see, for I'm white and male, could put to better use.

Then I realized that Algore has given me, and you, the answer: Eat shit.

If, as cooks say, you eat with your eyes, and you watched the Live Earth concerts, you did it twice.

Interesting. Mean. But interesting.

TO: Midland Area Golf Course Owners and Operators
FROM: Walsingham
SUBJECT: Employee Evaluations

Go have a look at your courses. If they don't look good this year you need to go ahead and fire the greenskeeper.

Iraq Defeats Heavily Favored Saudi Arabia to win Soccer's Asia Cup.

BAGHDAD (AP) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis from the Shiite south to the Kurdish-dominated north poured into the usually treacherous streets Sunday to celebrate a rare moment of joy and unity when the national team won Asia's most prestigious soccer tournament.

[snip]

Within seconds of the final whistle, celebratory gunfire echoed across Baghdad and elsewhere despite a government ban and the threat of arrest by authorities.

We need to quit imposing our culture on these people.

From the largest cave of the Moonbat Left comes David Lindorff who tells us that Bushitlerburton and Company will likely declare "Martial Law".

The Nutroot Tabernacle Choir joins in with comments most (not all) echoing the same opinion.

Had I been lucky enough to get in the first comment and instead of arguing the likelihood of such an event just simply bet Mr. Lindorff $5000 that Bush would not declare Martial Law before he leaves office how long do you think it would have remained posted?

I have a friend, Ed, whom I knew rather well when I lived in Midland. He's now taken the cloth and is a priest in a Texas city and we have supper once or twice a year, to talk over old times, and new ones, as each of us finds a new life.

At one time Ed was rather conservative and when he was in the seminary I heard him defend, and rather eloquently, Western values, for he had studied Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and understood their contributions to Western thought. Thank God for Aquinas who made reading them possible. But the war in Iraq has radicalized him and made him the leader of a group of pacifist priests.

Once we were walking in the park and he attempted to sell me on the idea that we had to understand the Muslims who murdered innocent people on 9/11. I was so shocked to hear this from someone whom I'd respected in the past that I was nonplussed. I had known, of course, that he was easily led, his good mind governed mostly by feelings, and who let his internal weather overrule his reason: in other words, a slight hysteric. But a kind, intelligent, learned man who alone of my friends can discuss various performances of Mozart. I introduced him to Monteverdi, and he tried to introduce me to Hindemith, whose introductory CD remains on the shelf.

Of the murderous Muslims, I said that when people say that they want to die to kill Americans and then do just that, I understand them perfectly well. And I believe them too. And yet Ed insisted that we understand what made them that way, that we were responsible for their actions, and you can guess the old familiar blame-America-first stance.

The Theocritus

Walsingham, Shepherd, Vaughn, Nat, MFKJ, Old Otto, Bleu, Ospurt, you have jobs and I guess that you make maybe one hundred thousand a year, but you can be replaced. GEORGE BUSH CAN BE REPLACED. THE POPE, SENATOR CORNYN AND BILL RICHARDSON CAN BE REPLACED. GOVERNOR PERRY CAN BE REPLACED, WITH A WIG HEAD AND A TUBE OF HAIR MOUSSE. BUT THE THEOCRITUS CANNOT BE REPLACED. The Theocritus is the inventor of the air, of the light, of the sun, of food, of electricity.

Oh hell. This is bootless. Might as well mock a rock. I'd get the same response.

The-eurasian, nothing is off post in this post. Fire away. Let's hear more, if you Khanh, about the Tran wreck.

I wonder if flogging concrete pillars is nepotism. Or if it violates the 14th Amendment. Petrae in capite.

Can there be any doubt that as far as our enemies are concerned that Hollywood is essentially now conquered territory?

From the New York Times:

On Sept. 14, Warner Independent Pictures expects to release "In the Valley of Elah," a drama inspired by the Davis murder, written and directed by Paul Haggis, whose "Crash" won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones (and Susan Sarandon, btw --Ed.) as a retired veteran who defies Army bureaucrats and local officials in a search for his son's killers. In one of the movie's defining images, the American flag is flown upside down in the heartland, the signal of extreme distress.

Other coming films also use the damaged Iraq veteran to raise questions about a continuing war. In "Grace Is Gone," directed by James C. Strouse and due in October from the Weinstein Company, John Cusack and two daughters struggle with the loss of a wife and mother who is killed on duty. Kimberly Peirce’s "Stop-Loss," set for release in March by Paramount, meanwhile, casts Ryan Phillippe as a veteran who defies an order that would send him back to Iraq.

........

That impetus for immediacy is driving other filmmakers and studios as well. In October, for example, New Line Cinema will release "Rendition," in which Reese Witherspoon plays a woman whose Egyptian-born husband is snared by a runaway counterterrorism apparatus. Paul Greengrass, the director of "The Bourne Ultimatum," in which the bad guys belong to a similar rogue unit, is adapting Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book about the Green Zone in Baghdad, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," for Universal Pictures.

Brian De Palma’s "Redacted," focusing on an Army squad that persecutes an Iraqi family, is to be released in December by Magnolia Pictures. And Sony Pictures is developing a film based on the story of Richard A. Clarke, the former national security official and Bush administration critic.

Plus, here is a YouTube video of the "Lions and Lambs" trailer that I saw at the cineplex the other night. You tell me where you think this is going....

I have heard chemotherapy treatment described as a process that kills the good cells just a little bit slower than it kills the cancer cells. The absolute best case that can be made for Hollywood and much of the mainstream media at this point is that they think of themselves as some sort of "chemotherapy" for the country and body politic as a whole in that they know that their actions are widely destructive but that what they are doing is just sligthly more deadly to the bad cells (the Bush Administration) than it is to the other cells in the body.

(h/t: Opfor)

While refreshing my memory on Gro Harlem Brundtland, the quondam prime minister of Norway, a country with a few more people than Greater Houston, I turned to, of course, Wikipedia. There is a separate article on Norwegian road signs which so perfectly captures the extreme tediousness, officiousness and humorlessness of Scandinavians that I thought you might enjoy it. Well, it amused me.

I am particularly fond of the warning sign which, translated, says, "Animals (polar bear - Only on Svalbard)" This is an archipelago belonging to Norway in the Artic Circle. It is also, by the way, the site of the proposed Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Which is described thus:

By the year 2007 the Norwegian government is planning on building a "doomsday" seed bank in which as many species' seeds as possible will be stored. The Norwegian government will be building this bank by hollowing out a 120-meter tunnel on Spitsbergen cut into rock with a natural temperature of - 6 degrees Celsius, refrigerating it to - 18 degrees Celsius, and then storing seeds donated by the 1,400 crop repositories maintained by countries around the world. The proposed bank will have top security blast-proof doors and would have two airlocks. The number of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries participating in the project, with the first seeds arriving in 2008. The initiative of this project is to prevent needed plants (wild, agricultural, etc.) from going extinct due to a global catastrophe such as global warming (the tunnel is 130 meters above sea-level) or nuclear war.

I wonder if Bill Clinton will contribute to this.

Cooling the tunnel will contribute to Global Warming (tm).

Will they preserve nutgrass seeds? African roo? Kudzu? Genetically modified plants yielding higher food supplies? Don't bet on that one for weeds are holier than scientific products which feed people because... I've been there and am bored.

And since species are going extinct at rates which vary from one end of a hysterical First Church of Gaia book to the other end, how will they get the seeds to preserve them? How will they know what they've missed if all they know is that they've missed some? Such fun. Such fun.

Now if only Ted Turner and Michael Moore would all get together, take off their clothes, put mud and sticks in their hair, and sit on the frozen ground of Spitsbergen. It would cause a bozon conflux and herald the end of the world.

It would be worth it just for the pleasure of the sight.

It's good to be back.

I have just spent the last several days 140' above the River Walk in San Antonio, eating well. Pesca in the Watermark is wonderful, Biga on the Banks superb, and even the restaurant at the Westin is worth eating at although they're proud of it. And all the mortgage brokers were either trying to find their way out of the Wally World parking lot or in the closet, which improved things mightily.

And I come back from peace and tranquility to that suggestion of Nelson Mandela for his global village and global elders.

This is wonderfully funny, to hear this latest egestion from the progressive bien pensant. This global village is yet another socialist contrivance, a camel's nose to convince people that we are all just people, which is true, we all have rights, which is true, and that it follows that everyone on earth has a call on the resources and liberty and property of the rich people on earth, which does not follow. And it particularly does not follow that the people who posit this touchy-feely clap trap should be the ones to do it, which is what they're up to. Never lose sight of that. Follow the money. The people who take it on behalf of others always have sticky fingers.

Oh. My. God.

"We are moving to a global village and yet we don't have our global elders. The Elders can be a group who have the trust of the world, who can speak freely, be fiercely independent and respond fast and flexibly in conflict situations."

Link is not safe for work....because the boss will be mad when you puke all over your company provided computer.

One of the things that makes blogs so powerful is their ability to tap into knowledge that is widely distributed but that before the advent of the internet and blogs had no way to connect to the public and vice versa.

Case in point: The New Republic (home of Stephen Glass for those that remember) has run a series of columns from someone they purport to be a soldier in Iraq and to whom they have given the nom de plume "Scott Thomas". The columns all paint our soldiers in Iraq in a pretty bad light with stories ranging from insensitivity and callousness to downright cruelty.

But is "Scott Thomas" really a U.S. soldier. And even if he is are the stories true?

If you want to see what I refer to as distributed knowledge going to work on a story go to this post at Hot Air.

And then read the comments.

You be the judge.

I was watching The Godfather, Part II and noticed that everyone was smoking, and remembered past times. These days it's a bit of a shock to see people smoke, except in A-list Hollywood movies, where they might be doing it as a product placement, but when my family bought this business in 1971 my first job was sweeping the floors and emptying ashtrays--about ten in the office. And how they did stink.

I've worn the edges off vices, enjoying them to the full, sometimes to more than the full and to the point of bad payback, but smoking was never one of them. In fact, the only times that I have smoked were when I was drinking and dancing with women. I've led an exciting life. But smoking was legal then, is legal now, and this is not the place to expand on how it will never be made illegal for the taxes are huge, and people who smoke die early and are cheaper to treat than support in old age. But I can't be right for that would be imputing cynical actions to politicians. That politicians will whore your health for money while strangling the goose that lays the golden egg very nearly to death, complaining about how evil tobacco is, while subsidizing the farmers who grow it, and all the time rolling in that lovely money. Even I am nauseated by the hypocrisy and I've watched Hillary's announcement that she's running for president, which I thought was the acid test.

I regret to annouce that I will be retiring from full time blogging shortly after the 2008 general election in order that I may accept my new assignment as the United States Ambassador to the Cayman Islands for the Burge Administration.

This is insane.

UPDATE: Great line from the comments: "This is like Texas forgetting Sam Houston so the little children can make room in their heads for Willie Nelson ! Bah !"

And for all of those readers out there who always thought to themselves how unfair we were or how we here were mischaracterizing the efforts of the Midland Development Corporation when we basically said that local business know whether or not they need to expand and will do so without any help from the MDC if they find that they do need to expand.

And that the Midand Development Corporation has done nothing more than to train these companies to come to the public trough for free money once they have made the decision to expand because....well....because they get free money when they do.

Were we wrong?

"Mike Hatley, the Chamber's economic development vice president, told the Reporter-Telegram after the meeting that when considering an application economic development staff do not focus on whether a company is likely to expand with or without an incentive, but rather on the benefits that a company's expansion could offer to the community."

Emphasis mine...because I really didn't want anyone to miss the part where the guy in charge of economic development at the chamber outright admits that they don't actually bother with trying to determine if their spending of your hard earned tax dollars has any causal effect on anything.

The entire premise of the ED Sales Tax was to provide incentives. Period. We always thought it was b.s. but it sure is nice to have in print the fact that the chamber essentially agrees.

I swear, if a private company took your money under such false pretenses they would be rightly sued into oblivion.

Bravo to Councilman Dingus for seeing that the Emperor is at least shirtless.

And has a really, really hairy back.

At his blog, Stewart Doreen asks, "Why are all the tables empty?"

For the second time in a month, my family went to a restaurant on the loop to find a full waiting area and at least one-third of the restaurant empty.

2.6 unemployment strikes again.

We have talked over and over again about the need for a workforce here in Midland. We have thrown out hypotheticals of what happens when businesses don't have the staff needed for daily operations.

Guess hypotheticals are now real life problems.

Indeed they are. This same thing happened to me at Jorge's on the Loop. A thirty minute wait for a table and the entire front section of the restaurant (20 tables roughly) was empty.

This is a problem that must be addressed!

That is why I am going to apply for an economic development grant from the Midland Development Corporation. If they give me, say, $225,000, I promise to not hire anyone for two years thereby decreasing the pressure on local businesses looking to alleviate their employee shortages.

As ridiculous as this sounds, it is just this sort of program that makes up 95% of everything done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So don't go looking at me like I'm Crazy McLooneytunes or something.

Okay, I am totally confused.

Am I gay because I like Fred Thompson or am I gay because if Fred Thompson is gay then so must I be?

Insider complaining about the perceived about the decline of the CBS Evening News, which they imagine has not been going on since the days when Cronkite started saying, "And that's the way it is" while we knew his saying it meant it wasn't:

There's not a lot of money there because we're paying for Katie! Let's not bullshit. People are pissed about Katie because she's soaking up the money and she's not making any money. I can't get a raise because Katie Couric is failing on the Evening News? That's huge.

A CBS news reporter is quoted in an article here. Evidently CBS News is in the middle of a civil war, with the Ratheristas grousing about the ascension to the Throne of Murrow of Katie Couric.

Rather, as you recall, was forced out by his insistence on sticking by his delusions about faked documents about W--which he defended on the grounds that although they weren't true they ought to have been, an excuse which could be profitably employed by anyone from your neighborhood curtain-twitcher to a rabid anti-Semite, one found on every corner for your shopping convenience, spreading blood libels about Jews.

Today we are handing out some rarely-used Kudos (we have quite a stash) to the Midland Reporter-Telegram. What for you ask? For running a huge photo of our troops and their Iraqi fellow soldiers in Baqubah this morning on the front page. This is a very encouraging sign and we appreciate it. Thank you, MRT.

The caption includes positive news that the pictured patrol was involved in rounding up suspected al Qaeda members in the town in the first sentence. Very good news indeed!

But (you knew there'd be a "but" didn't you?) the "related" AP article on page 2 (no link) made no mention of Baqubah or the successes of the current offensive, related to the much maligned "troop surge". This is not the MRT's fault, unless there was a more closely related Iraq article that they could have run instead. The only positive news I gleaned from the combined article and front page photo was that first sentence in the photo caption.

Michael Yon's latest dispatch is here. He has been picked up by National Review Online. It'd be nice if the MRT could figure a way to do the same.

On July 7, Algore's Live Earth concerts took place at various venues with a stated purpose of raising public awareness of climate change. Beware the phrase "raise awareness" for it is always in the first sentence of some uplifter who has thought he's found a way to at the very least insert himself into your life and more likely into your pocket. Note also the suggestion that you are not a sensitive and therefore worthy individual until shamed and prodded by the bien pensant.

Back to the story. Of course we were treated to the usual strutting cockatiels, glad to prance in front of a camera and for a good cause yet. But in an astonishing display of sentience not often spotted in homo famosus egotissimus, some of the performers have noted that banging a drum over climate change while flying in on private jets, using limos, and playing under hot lights contributes a great deal to just the sort of climate change they say they're all against. Someone must have raised their awareness.

This is the funniest thing I have read in days. From Mark Steyn (some might say "of course") at NRO on Saturday.

This reality notwithstanding, the rest of you really need to cut it out.

You need to read it all to put this sentence in context.

Update: And this runs a very close second.

"The fact that some of the people involved in the recent unfortunate events may have been doctors is totally coincidental, just as if they had been accountants, plumbers, or random members of a deranged apocalyptic religious cult."

His update from Thursday on Operation Arrowhead Ripper is here. I find it curious that his work is rarely linked: His is truly balanced coverage of an important operation. I would think that other media would pick up on a leading edge correspondent, but I often find that I think wrongly on such matters.

I see via Instapundit that the NYTimes actually has run an article on the battles in Baqubah as well, though it's tone leaves something to be desired. The death-to-anyone-not-aligned-with-them Al Qaeda in the town are variously referred to as "insurgents" and "militants". I'd prefer something a little stronger, as you will see.

In case you think that the NYTimes has changed it's view of the Long War, here are the headlines of recent reporting linked by the NYTimes with their "good" story on Baqubah.

"Bombs, Gunmen and a U.S. Copter Crash Claim Lives in Iraq" (July 5, 2007)
"Doctor Accused in Glasgow Attack Described as Loner Angry About the Iraq War" (July 5, 2007)
"Bush Evokes Revolutionary War to Bolster the U.S. Cause in Iraq" (July 5, 2007)
"3rd American Soldier Charged in Murder of an Iraqi Civilian" (July 3, 2007)

Warning: a frightening scene described below the jump. Children and adults with weak stomachs are warned.

Ex CIA Agent, current thug, and permanent dweller below the Mendoza Line of terror prognostication Larry Johnson makes sure to let David Brooks know that Johnson "knows where he lives" by taking a picture of his mailbox.

So we took a picture of Johnson's mailbox. He doesn't live that close to Brooks after all.

Not from The Onion (it seems that we need to say this more and more):

"The sight of the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, jogging -- often wearing his favorite NYPD T-shirt -- has fired up a tempest in a Reebok in France and Britain this summer. Sarkozy's running is an un-French, right-wing conspiracy, suggests Paris' left-wing newspaper Liberation. In response, British commentators gleefully conclude: The French have lost their minds, again.

On the primary state television channel, France 2, Alain Finkielkraut, a leading French intellectual [emphasis mine because I find it hilarious that leading French intellectuals are taking time out from...what, exactly...discussing the genius of Jerry Lewis to discuss this at all?], recently demanded that Sarkozy give up his "undignified" exercise. Not only did he imply that exposing the boss's naked knees is something that never would have occurred in the time of Mitterrand, much less Louis XIV, Finkielkraut claimed strolling is the proper activity of the thinking person, from Socrates to the poet Arthur Rimbaud."

Did they check to see if there was a German chasing him?

*rim shot*

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Be sure and tip your waitresses.

Today Al, an old friend, came in to talk about Chuck. Al is the president of a very small governmental organization, and has inserted me, twice, into its directorate for I have the three needed qualifications and when they cast the net prescribed by law, it is so small that finding people to serve is difficult.

One of the other directors, Chuck, is acting in a way which I could not fathom. He has been a director for years and ought to know better.

Chuck has presented invoices to the board for payment for work that the board did not authorize--acting without authorization to spend the district's money is a felony. Also he is the financial officer who, owing to negligence, did not inform the board of our fiduciary responsibilities under a Texas act, exposing us, technically, to prison time. This is not worrying; as soon as we found out, we took decisive action and have a paper trail. The headlights of the bus are bearing down on him, unheeding. And no money is missing, and nothing risky was done. But still, the technical risk is there.

I was listeneing to Air America on the satellite radio yesterday which was amazing for two reasons. The first reason being that it is amazing that it is still there to be listened to, and the second being that even in a country of 300 million people my turn to listen to Air America comes up a lot sooner than it should.

In any event, they are going nuts on the Scooter Libby thing. Absolutely bonkers. Someone named Stacy Taylor (who is a man) was substituting for Randy Rhoades (who is a woman) and had as his guest some lawyer lady who had written a new book that had the distinction of being the 217th hit piece on Chimpy McHitlerburton's AmeriKKKA, basically, and who stated outright that the she knew....just kneeewwwwww!....that Bush commuted Libby's sentence because Libby threatened to sing like a bird and implicate the Vice President in the big cover-up.

The big cover-up being the outing of Valerie Plame, the most un-covert covert CIA operative in the history of the planet. (That whirring sound you hear is Wild Bill Donovan spinning in his grave at the thought that Valerie Plame is what is being produced by our intelligence services now. If Mr. Donovan learns about Larry Johnson the spinning will increase to the point that the Earth will actually be knocked off of it axis.)

Okay, for the sake of argument only, let us stipulate that Libby purposely leaked Plame's name to Robert Novak...and even did so at the Vice President's direction. And Libby did not finger Cheney so as to guarantee that he would not spend a day in jail, just like lawyer lady on the radio says.

How did they get Richard Armitage to cop to being the leaker?

The special prosecutor has in hand a guy that admits to leaking the information about Ms. Fifteen Minutes of Plame (The single greatest national security nightmare of our time!), but in a twenty minute conversation on the subject his name (Armitage) was not mentioned a single time. Not once.

The left is only interested in the source of the "leak" if it can be tied to the office of the Vice President.

Related: You would think that, of all people, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton would find the whole pardon/commutation thing at least a bit awkward and to keep a low profile on the subject.

You would be wrong.

Mr. Clinton pardoned 140 people on his last day in office. Included in that group of 140 were his own relatives, people that were paying Hillary's brothers to lobby for pardons for them, several major drug dealers, and most famously, Marc Rich, former husband of Denise Rich, a lady who gave millions to the DNC.

At least Mr. Libby subjected himself to the legal process in this country, costing him two years of his professional life, and a few million in legal fees, and his license to practice law.

Marc Rich never had a sentence to commute or pardon because he fled the country and lived like a prince abroad rather than face the system.

Come to think of it, I never heard his name mentioned either on Air America. And given the size of their audience, if I didn't hear it then it wasn't heard.

Must reading here and here and here and, lastly, here.

H/T to Insty, Confederate Yankee, Captains Quarters, Michael Yon and PowerLine.

That is all.

The History Channel is telling me what went on over 200 years ago so that we could celebrate the 4th of July and so far they're just up to why we got really pissed at the English. And so, after the Crown withdrew the Massachusetts charter, the Americans decided that that just wouldn't do and shots were fired and here we are, 231 years later. And, on reflection, it's a good thing too.

There are the commercials hawking products and programs with a lot of excited flag-waving and all that put me off, just a little bit, for the first time in my life. Why, I wondered, would I change, in my reflexive appreciation of all things American? And that I would even use a sneer like flag-waving? And what does this say about my feelings for America, of all things? Did those change? And it set me thinking and made me realize that the reason for my feelings for America did change but not, after examination, the feelings themselves.

As I have hinted, said, mewled, or brayed, in these pages over the last several months, 2006 was a cusp year for me--cheating death is the one most obviously apprehensible, but with that came something else: the collapse of ideology. I was a right-wing ideologue, and I am no more. Anyone reading me knows that my opinions are, for the most part, rather conservative and I do a rather brisk line of abuse of moonbat lefties and I don't feel that I'm yet at the top of my game, but now my opinions on all things are from a different source than they were at the start of 2006.

Theocritus....ohh Theocritus... You knew it was coming, we're hogging the sun.

HUMANS are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the sun's energy captured by plants - the most of any species.

The human dominance of this natural resource is affecting other species, reducing the amount of energy available to them by almost 10 per cent, scientists report.

Researchers said the findings showed humans were using "a remarkable share" of the earth's plant productivity "to meet the needs and wants of one species".

An agriculture professor at the University of Melbourne, Snow Barlow, said the paper showed humans were taking up too much of an important natural resource.

"Here we are, just one species on the earth, and we're grabbing a quarter of the renewable resources … we're probably being a bit greedy."

We humans can barely fathom the sheer amount of energy provided by the Sun on a daily basis because it is so huge, and we're being greedy?

(h/t to most of the conservative blogosphere)

The Urban Dictionary is a useful source of very colorful language, including words like locationship, a ship-board romance, technosexual, which explains itself, and the latest is

July 03, 2007:

iPerbole

The hype surrounding any product Apple unveils.

Claims that the iPhone will change the world are all part of the iPerbole surrounding the cultish company.

I offer this to the people who enjoy baiting me, a pleasure that I do not know.

For countless years, the Midland CVB M-Squad has gone out on I-20 and pulled over out of towner's in a marketing effort to get them to spend the night in Midland, on us.

I've always thought this was a curious practice and if the comments on MyWestTexas.com and John Kelso's ridicule of the practice in the Austin American Statesman are any indication, so do the wacko's in the world.

As a real critic of Midland's foray into building "un-natural" tourist and convention facilities, I think Kelso has the money quote that sums up the outside perception of Midland:

You mean they're so desperate in Midland for tourists that they've got to get the law to pull them over?

You might say I agree with Kelso on that point, but why do I say he and other commenter's are Wacko? Well it seems even a story about a town doing silly things for tourists can't escape BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), nor a good lashing out at Republican's, here's a sample:

And the gifts just keep on coming. "We've got putt-putt golf, and the Summer Mummers will give us tickets," Crane said. "It's a melodrama that's put on every weekend. It's a fun thing. You throw popcorn and boo the villain and all that."

Speaking of booing, some winners get tickets to the George W. Bush home.

Please, you gave Texas Craddick, (I have absolute power), now your pulling over law abiding citizens, causing possible traffic accidents or personal jeopardy and cheer about it.

UPDATE: Read the blog post by "Jimmy the P."

(Do I get my little gold "content" sticker now?)

From Jim Treacher at The Daily Gut, commenting on the fact that three British National Health Service doctors were involved in the recent terrorist attacks in London and in Scotland:

Reminds me of that old joke:

"Doc! Doc! It hurts when I do this!"

"Die, unbeliever!!!" [douses them both with kerosene and lights match]

An odd thing happened, occasioned by my purchase of a house here in Culo del Pecos, which needs some attention. The underlying skeleton is very fine; the room layout good; the construction good. Some things need to be done, though; that's where all the avocado and burnt orange went to die. I am told that they're coming in again, to which my response is, "Your point?"

I was talking to Carl, the local plumber. Our families go back a way and he is a curmudgeon who makes me look like Mary Poppins. I promise that I do not traffic in being gay but there is a reason for being public, to put a face on it, and so I let it be known with something much less than an announcement, and I could see a slight shock of reappraisal in his eyes, which is just what I'm aiming for, and at the right level too. How was he to re-evaluate me? His sister, older by a decade, and I have been friends since the 7th grade. I've been around for a while. I'm a known quantity. Now different but still known.

We all heard about the downed tower in Seminole by the big storm the other night. Here is a picture taken by someone...I don't know who.

(The photo came via e-mail from someone who needs to know about the "bcc:" option when sending e-mails. And if, dear reader, you don't know what the "bcc:" option in e-mail is then so do you.)

UPDATE: It wasn't the wind. The tower was brought down by the Bush Administration.....with a controlled demolition because of....of....uh.....Halliburton!

Mayor Canon has yet to announce one way or another whether he is running for another term as Mayor. The are several reasons why he may want to and several why he may not.

Use the comments to say why you think he might decide one way or another. And you don't have to pick one side or the other. You can provide reasons for both.

(Note: To take Shep's observations about "Thread-Jacking" to heart I will remove comments that go off topic)

Apparently, an entire village in Iraq has been tortured and massacred by a "bumper sticker slogan".

Michael Yon reports.

And make a mental note to see how long it takes (if ever) before you see this in any local or national news reportage.