Dean's World

Here's the proof.

Today is the day of the California Primary.

There is a man who has a reasonable shot at becoming the first African American to be a major-party nominee for president.

Today is the longest day of Jack Bauer's life.

This situation cannot possibly continue.

A few days ago, in full recognition of the fact that every photo approved by the management at the Yuma Daily Sun tends to hang around for awhile, I submitted two quite wonderful snapshots of my granddaughters.

One of the two made a clear political statement. The reader will have to guess which one. ;>)

They got first-page recognition for only a short time, (not even a day!) when some unknown dog owner put up his or her Chihuauas. Now I ask you, is not a photo of the most beautiful three-year-old in the world, in her fairy wings and princess dress, using her screwdriver at her workbench, far more charming than a static headshot of some dumb dog?

The second photo is even more valuable, as it portrays the deepening sense of comfort these mini-women have in their own home, where both Mommy and Daddy abide. Young Carley feels free to use a finger to explore the contents of a nostril.

We should all have a sigh. Allow yourself to feel.

Yeah, well, I just want my kids to be first-- so what!!! http://www.yumasun.com/share/photo/?plckPhotoID=3552390c-5442-429c-8de7-38b519c14bf2&plckGalleryID=70ff8219-a378-4a93-b23e-7ac8188c77d7

No, they don't make you join anything! http://www.yumasun.com/share/photo/?plckPhotoID=cc01a27f-a62e-4a0b-adbb-00d011e4b9ab&plckGalleryID=70ff8219-a378-4a93-b23e-7ac8188c77d7

Stupid Goddamn Poweblogs

Several weeks passed before Beauchamp sent us another story--one recounting dialogue between French soldiers along a guard tower, taunting and catapulting cows at British SAS forces, which we rejected.

A Web logger for Time magazine, Ana Marie Cox, reported on November 11 that "a little birdie" had urged her to fact-check the Illinois senator's claims against his kindergarten record.

Wow! I don't really post here all that often, do I? Hm. Ok, I promise: as soon as I recover from this head-wound, I'll put up a post about how the WGA strikers are dead write...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Police have lost red-light cameras to traffic accidents but never to gun play. "This is the first one that's been shot," Capt. Gordon Catlett said of the wounded camera at the intersection of Broadway Avenue and Interstate 640 — one of 15 camera-equipped intersections in the city.

Clark, now facing a $50 fine if convicted and loss of his rifle, refused to say anything about the incident to police, leaving the motive unclear.

I totally went through this. Only with my dog.

I saw this commercial on TV a couple nights ago and laughed my butt off. I suspect you need to be a gamer to fully appreciate the humor.

I looked at all 100+ pages of pictures at I Can Has Cheezburger? in the span of three days. It's like crack I tell ya!

Here's a wittle sumphin' fer u Haloz f@nz out there.

IMMA CHARGIN' MAH LAZER!!!1!!111!

Via Weekend Pundit's DCE (my brother, don'tcha know) who notes "You don't need to understand the math to enjoy the sentiment."

join me at City of Brass as I honor my ethnic heritage, the great and vast civilization of India.

(all thanks, and blame, go to Willow.)

Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the "a," the dip on the top of the "t," the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.
...
This is not a new fight. Journalism has always pissed people off. It is supposed to. It should be provocative. It should ask hard questions of everyone on every side. It shouldn't play favorites and it shouldn't fear honest criticism.

Last night I moved my son into his apartment- he'll be attending Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH and found an opportunity to live cheaply off-campus, so he jumped at it. As we unloaded the van and he and his roommate unpacked I reached for my cell phone to call home and let my wife know I would be later than I'd thought...

NO SERVICE.

I asked them about it and they both flipped open their phones...

NO SERVICE.

And so we finished and I headed home, trying not to giggle too hard at the thought of these two teenagers, children of the age of total connectivity, sitting in their new apartment up in the hills of Northern New Hampshire with no phone, no cable TV, no Internet, and a 30 minute drive to any place they might be able to avail themselves of such things.

The Cable and Internet won't be connected until next weekend. I figure he'll be home by tomorrow morning.

ABUJA (Reuters) - An amateur video of a northern Nigerian film actress in a sex scene has caused a public outcry in the Muslim north, prompting a movie industry body to expel actors deemed "immoral", a local newspaper reported on Monday.
...
Leadership said the Kano state Filmmakers' Association had reacted to the scandal over the sex video by expelling 17 actors deemed to have brought the industry into ill repute.

The 17 were not connected to the video clip but were "thought to be involved in immoral acts such as drunkenness and fornication", the newspaper reported.

Now the funny thing is I've known women who actually have the gall to get angry at this sort of thing and site it as proof of rampant male chauvanism or "oppression of women." That's what life was like in the '70s and '80s especially...

Anyway, more funny at Nationalbanana.com.

Our Constitution, is the 1.0 design, though it's in REV 27 by now. The Brits do have an older one, but it's still in Beta-- and documentation is spotty at best! Must have been written by Google...

Ariel
Beverly
Carrol
Dana
Dakota
Evelyn
Jordan
Joyce
Leslie
Marion
Meredith
Morgan
Paris
Peyton
Stacey
Taylor
Tracy

Every one of those used to be common boy's names. Now, in the West, amongst English speakers, they're generally considered feminine.

As is "Ali" by the way.

And you know, it swings the other way. There are a ton of girls in America now running around with names like "Madison." And, it turns out, "Thomas" used to be a popular girl's name.

I don't think there's anything deep there, except that it's sort of funny.

I tell people that I like the writings of Evelyn Waugh and I like the musicals of Meredith Wilson, and they think I'm talking about women. Which, I wouldn't mind at all if they were women, but they weren't.

My aunt Beverly would undoubtedly find this amusing.

I think if I ever am lucky enough to father a daughter, I'll name her "Sam."

I don't know if this made it to the front page:

Of course, you can't watch this one too often :)

I mostly ignore hate mail, but once in a while it's fun to play with the trolls. Case in point, the brilliant Jacob Karsemeyer:

This is pure genius, no? How can you top this Karsemeyer guy? I savor every moment of this exchange.

Luckily some enterprising reporter managed to smuggle this video out from Iraq. Hasn't been verified but seems pretty incriminating to me. This stuff dates back to the 1980s!!

No wonder these guys won time's "Person of the Year"!

Edward Luttwak has a fascinating essay that argues, startlingly, that last year's war with Hezbollah wasn't the disaster it's been made out to be. He starts with some fascinating history:

In the immediate aftermath of the 1973 October War there was much joy in the Arab world. The myth of Israeli invincibility had been shattered by the surprise Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal and the Syrian offensive that swept across the Golan Heights. In Israel, there was harsh criticism of political and military chiefs alike, who were blamed for the loss of close to 3,000 soldiers in a war that ended without a clear victory. Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, the Chief of Staff David Elazar and the chief of military intelligence were all discredited and soon replaced.

It was only later that a sense of proportion was regained, ironically by the Egyptian and Syrian leaders before anyone else.

Then he does a pretty surprisingly good job of comparing that 1973 conflict (which everyone now agrees was a decisive and positive moment in Israeli history) to the current situation, and concludes:

For that very reason, the outcome of the war is likely to be viewed in the long term as more satisfactory than many now seem to believe it. Nasrallah is not another Arafat, who was fighting for eternal Palestine rather than the present generation of Palestinians (whose prosperity and safety he was always willing to sacrifice for the cause). Nasrallah has a political constituency, and it happens to be centered in southern Lebanon. Implicitly accepting responsibility for having started the war, Nasrallah has directed his Hezbollah to focus on rapid reconstruction in villages and towns, right up to the Israeli border. He cannot start another round of fighting because that would destroy everything again. Yet another unexpected result of the war is that Nasrallah's power-base in southern Lebanon is now a hostage to Hezbollah's good behaviour.

But you should read the whole thing.