Are you kidding me?!

I was browsing on a cheese sandwich in my car this noon, and listening to the BBC news on KSUI (910 AM, anyway) when I heard someone say that <OSTROBOGULATION ALERT>Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki can order American troops to stand down from doing the job U.S. authority ordered them to do!</OSTROBOGULATION ALERT>

Good lord, if a Democrat were President, Rush Limbaugh would be screaming bloody TREASON. I'm not sure I'm not, as a John McCain Democrat. Is Bush in charge, or is he just a dithering idiot whose brains sleep on Condaleezza Rice's pillowcase?

Dept. of Laughing Till It Hurts Department

According to the AP, George W. Bush has accused Democrats of not having a plan for Iraq.













Doh.

George, Iowa 51237

Fillmore's license tag is 51237, a sly reference (via George, Iowa's zipcode) to George Carlin.

Chet Culver

I cast my early ballot for Chet Culver a few days ago, as a matter of record. But elections are a fair measure of how contenders mix it up in vigorous, even unfair, debate — and Chet Culver is coming up short. He answers body blows with silence, as though comatose, and does not counterpunch. And he has no sense of history.

Nussle^† does. He's got an upbeat "Iowa is beautiful" message out there, and it's a page ripped straight out of Dick Clark's play book. Of course, it's also Reagan's "morning in America" ad, but the allusion to Dick Clark is too obvious to put down.

Culver's negatives are personal — stature and gravity, nimbleness and wit. He can't really blame the off-the-wall slime buckets at the RNCC for losing this election. He's not answering the slimers, and that's a huge mistake.

Bob Ray, Terry Branstad, Jim Nussle... Ok. The Iowa Governor's job is so boring, maybe it takes a real pedestrian to put up with it — or want it bad enough to care. I really get the impression Culver views the Governorship as a stepping stone to 2010 and a run for the U.S. Senate, even though the job has actually been a political dead end since at least Harold Hughes.

Culver will lose on November 7, and I don't know if that's a pity. If he does, it's time to move aside and let better wits develop Iowa's future.

^†If you're looking for footnotes about who these people are, and what happened when, ask your betters.

The slippery soft soap

Dick Cheney has set our minds at rest. The United States doesn't use "torture" under any circumstances. All we do is strap detainees to a board and dunk their heads under water for minutes at a time. If they live, it's ok, because it's only "torture" if they die. It's not fatal the way our highly-trained personnel do it, so it's not "torture." And if they do die, what we fill out on the death certificate is Natural Causes. Also very, very, very, very, very true, of course. When you stop breathing, you die, but that's your fault.

The Caltex Wall o' Silence

We're apparently spending $6 billion big ones to slam down a waffle between the U.S. and Mexico. Two years from now, when it comes time to compare the gaps in the chain of links to the appalling nonsense we just paid for — when, in other words, the accounts come up short — will President McCain have the balls to dig up the black ops that wall funded, the secret prisons it built, the strange ex-Marines and CIA specialists who relished their on the job training — the head jobs you really don't want moving into your neighborhood — or running for Congress from your district, for that matter?

(Yeah, what's with that spook in Wisconsin, for example? What does an ex-Marine have against Vietnamese hookers, and why? Don't ask, don't tell?)

wt...?

I found a little piece of a ballet tangled in my ukulele strings the other evening. I wonder what it is? Something by Tschaikovsky...? Fun.

Sergeant Marlboro Man is a big fat sissy!

That boomingly sarcastic baritone voice Republicans use in attack ads has lost some of its cachet this year. Easiest to recognize, easiest to associate with Republican incompetence and the Iraq charnelhouse. The public gorge rises...

Honda's Troll Ad

Honda's troll ad was the best thing on television this weekend, even counting the nervously fretful glee by Democrats on the talking heads cable shows, anticipating big wins November 7th.

Ad Glacés

stop and go driving
nagging back pain
for their patients who chew gum
mmm-mm good
it slices, it dices
down the drain
a silly millimeter longer
for more than four hours
but wait there's more

Why are Republicans associating with Osama bin Laden?

Not to put too fine a point on it, you'd think a GOP attack ad featuring Osama bin Laden would just remind voters that Osama's still on the loose and W's not too very worried about finding him.

Talk about foozle factor.

Darned motivating, though. I stopped by the Linn County Auditor's Office this afternoon and cast an absentee ballot. I pity the fools.

Nuke Berlin?

Ross Berlin decided to leave Camp Wie, I guess. Is that more interesting than nukes in North Korea, I wonder? Hmmmm.... Yup.

I've got to admire the Japanese for wheedling a reaffirmation of the U.S. nuclear umbrella out of Condaleezza Rice. Is she a complete amateur?

Japan can assemble and launch a 20 megaton nuke on 48 hours notice, and scan the bubbling puddle of North Korean glass from space as the blast goes off, but no, that's our job! For one thing, every trade agreement by every zaibatsu in Japan goes down the toilet in 3° Kelvin if Japan rearms — from Moscow to Beijing to Melbourne and beyond, instantly, just like that. Japan must keep milking Macarthur's legacy (Japan's pacifist Constitution) for R&D advantage as long as possible, so forever and always it's our guns, and their butter.

Brilliant diplomacy, and my hat is off to Edo. Rice got screwed, but truth to tell, she had no options from Washington either. The nuclear umbrella makes perfectly good sense to Bush (either one), because that kind of manly role fits the prevailing faith-based faqs.

It's water to the tea, stupid!

Not tea to the water, and you can remember this with a little history lesson: Chinese coolies working from the west end of the transcontinental railway were sick less often than the Irish roustabouts working from the east end — because the Chinese filtered their clean-looking mountain stream water through tea leaves ("water to the tea"), while the Irish just used it to boil their coffee, no filtering. It makes a good story anyway.

Backstory When Disney's Mary Poppins first hit theaters in 1964, it included a song with Uncle Albert and the kids at tea whilst bobbing just under the ceiling (Uncle Albert was in his manic phase that day). The song included directions on how to pour out, with the semi-memorable injunction, "Never tea to the water, always water to the tea!" Forty two years anon, one is inclined to wonder which Never is correct: T to the H₂O, or H₂O to the T. And Disney pulled that song from all later versions, apparently stung by criticism at the time that teaching "coffee loving" American kids tea etiquette was downright un-American.

Little Snitch caching DNS information: How to clear

From MacFixit.com this afternoon:

MacFixIt reader David Oshel reports an issue where Little Snitch -- a tool for alerting the user of network activities -- appears to be caching DNS information which can cause problems with locating Web servers.

David writes:

"If you lose your website because your ISP has had to move your files to another server, and the two of you disagree about the IP address of your new site, it's probably because Little Snitch needs to be restarted. Apparently, it caches DNS information and won't update it even if you cold boot and power down your DSL modem. [...] I'm pretty sure that's what finally cured DNS on my iBook. The numbers were off by one in the third triad, and this was a real head-scratcher.

* xxx.xxx.114.xxx old, never updated
* xxx.xxx.144.xxx new, should have been updated in your dns system automatically

You can clear your Mac's DNS cache by entering the following command in the Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities):

* lookupd -flushcache

What's wrong with Michelle Wie?

My guess is, nothing. She's a normal 17 year old who doesn't use steroids and has a life — after school and sponsor commitments get done subdividing her time. And she pulled another $12,578 out of her driver sock for coming in 17th at the 2006 Samsung World Championship, talk about omens. AND her caddy seems to be Fanny Sunneson now. Kewl.

Somebody's been coaching her through the media circus, I noticed. She was asked about the Hawaii earthquake instead of golf — a fact I, a 24/7 newsaholic, was barely aware of — and she said all the expected insincere things right on cue. But you could detect the expletive dying of deletion in the gut reaction, then the double take as implications about friends sunk in.

[Update No casualities on the Big Island, apparently.]

Hullo? This Parrot is Stuffed with Tea Dept.

How to brew ISO 3103:1980 British standard tea. Ah! And here's a worthwhile BBC emendation on the very topic!<sup>†

†</sup>See Tea

ESPN Photo Wire summary of Michelle Wie pix

The ESPN Photo Wire summary of Michelle Wie today is kind of neat. There's a little mini-seminar of how course officials should have handled Wie's drop out of the golden lantana last year, the microscopically incorrect fault that got Michael "The Bamburglar" Bamberger's knickers in a twist and resulted in Wie's DQ. Speaking of the devil, where is Bamberger this year, not that anyone cares?

UPDATE: The Bamburglar was sighted in August taking on blogger Jennifer Mario at TravelGolf.com. Here's a link.

Can this be revived?

Trying to resuscitate Grikdog's Blog on www.blogger.com, because my ISP seems to have upchucked an entire serverload of websites, including mine.

dreck, dreck, dreck...

Some links:

• Michelle Wie's scorecard at the Samsung Open this week.
  
  
• Ian Whitcomb's Hawaiian Memories is required reading for ukulele buffs who aren't yet sick to death of Jake Shimabukuro shredding the classics for the rest of us. It turns out there's no such thing as "Hawaiian music", it's all moonlight and escapism for the tourist trade — as far back as the 1890's. No wonder Princess Likelike laid down on her bed and died of shame for Old Hawaii.