the kids

cassandra took these of our ferocious children... you'd better think twice before breaking into our estate here in formosa canyon... these cats will EAT you while you watch...



sure i haven't been blogging much... and you might think I don't have much to say if i'm blogging the cats...

maybe i have too much to say...

um, work is stressful, sometimes in a fun way, a lot in the "night sweats" kind of way.

I should learn to be more of a screw up...

but i can't


i'm too good... and humble, to boot...

i saw X-Men 3 this weekend with a few folks who hated it- from a fanboy's pov- i had nothing invested in it and thought it was adequate. I liked it better than the new king kong (so many lush cg fx... none of them believable! I thought the ship-in-the-fog sequence was the most suspenseful and succesful! the 1977 version had a better big-monkey-on-a-tear through manhattan sequence- the elevated train sequence rocked hard! )


but back to X-3- the dismissal of mystique stank of a) Ms. Romijn costs more per day these days, especially when she's painted blue and b) pepper dennis must have been shooting or something... she was so cool in the first two- what gives?

anyhoo- i don't care! never read an x-men funny book in my life. thought wolverine was a bad guy in the fantastic four


and finally , you can paint him blue and cover him in fake fur from ISW, but kelsey grammer is always going to be frasier friggin' crane...and why not?

and he can cry himself a river on the hawaii estate that talking like a wasp for 20 years bought him...

Memorial Day

Wikipedia?

Yes, my son...

How did Memorial Day start?

Freed slaves thanking Union troops for their sacrifice... at the racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865.

When did it become about a sale at Sit & Sleep?

Where have you been?

I've been doin' stuff...

What are you drinking?

Gin and tonic... want one?

Oy... you have a nice summer, ok?


(More on the origins of Memorial Day here & here)

Plans for Iran...

So if this is about to happpen:

Concern is building among the military and the intelligence community that the US may be preparing for a military strike on Iran, as military assets in key positions are approaching readiness, RAW STORY has learned.


You'll want to go here:


New Application for a U.S. Passport


Seriously, it might be time to man the fuckin' barricades or something.

Polish Star Wars!

In honor of two of my favorite things, Star Wars and KRUKWORLD, here' a Polish Star Wars Fanfilm that's fun and subtitled! Not for kids, though! Lots of foul-mouthed Poles in it!

Enjoy, Jimmy! You'll get the ambulance joke and maybe explain it to the rest of us?

Plame was working on WMD in Iran... the commie traitor!

Not that this will register with the hopeless wingnuts in your life- those that spin the spin until their encephalitic head just pops off... but Valerie Plame was no pencil-pusher at the CIA when NovakRove leaked her identity- turns out she was tracking down the nuclear goods on one of the Axis of Evil! Remember Evil? Remember when Bush wouldn't shut up about EVIL?

From crooks and liars and raw story

But the Greatest American , Mr. Goodwrench ads notwithstanding, is Stephen Colbert, for rubbing W's nose into the messy diaper that is his Adminstration's record...

So, Thank You Stephen Colbert

R2-Q5

Man this is a cool toy. I suggest you get one. But who was R2-Q5? Wookiepedia, fill us in...

We're all living with war

Go ahead and listen to Neil Young's new album, right here:

Neil Young - Living With War

Camp Casey Easter

Easter Service with Rev. Joseph Lowery at Camp Casey, Crawford, TX.
You can catch some of him onstage at Camp Casey with IVAW member Geoff Mallard and Charlie Anderson, here courtesy of truthout.org:

Dr. Joseph Lowery: The Soul of America
A Film by Scott Galindez

Dr. Joseph Lowery co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Lowery is concerned about the "Soul of America." He told those gathered at Camp Casey that they were the "Salt of the Earth" and they would be the ones to redeem America.

QuickTime
DSL | 56K
Windows Media
DSL | 56K
RealMedia
DSL | 56K

The number changed by ten on Saturday

This is is the sign Geoff and Charlie showed to the war supporters that rode by on horseback- the same group that said to Gold Star father Juan Torres: "F*ck your son, f*ck you!"

Supporting the Troops indeed.

The Stations of the Cross started in Crawford and processed past the Bush ranch and on to Camp II, led by Johnny Wolff of the Crawford Peace House.

tweety and twitty

(object in image fatter than it appears)


Chris Matthews and Delay... I've heard the griping that Matthews was a wingnut, but wasn't sure...

Yep. Wingnut.

Harry Shearer sucked this feed from the ionosphere. Matthews sucked something else.




MATTHEWS: Hey thank you for calling me. It was a good thing for me, mostly.

DELAY: Oh really.

MATTHEWS: Oh of course it was. We got on the air as fast as we could....

[...]

MATTHEWS: Shannon [DeLay aide] told me, she called me, she said 'don't worry -- he's not calling in to complain'...

MATTHEWS: Have you seen this new focus group stuff on the candidates?

DELAY: No I haven't

MATTHEWS: It's great stuff. I'll send it to you -- it's great -- yeah it's great stuff. Hillary, John Kerry. All these guys, all these democrats, and how they do. And, uh, Frank Luntz did it...

DELAY: who I like

CM: ...and Hillary did not do well. Kerry did well.

DELAY: You're kidding.

MATTHEWS: I am NOT kidding. They didn't like Edwards -- they thought he was a rich lawyer, pretending to care about poor people...

DELAY: Too slick. Too slick.

MATTHEWS: ...and Hillary was a know-it-all.

DELAY: Nothing worse than a woman know-it-all

[...]

MATTHEWS: Thanks. I owe you one. I owe you two -- today and last night.

DELAY: No you don't.

MATTHEWS: No, I do.

DELAY: I appreciate it.

WATCH via Huffington Post, here

cocky little bandy rooster

Some things I love today:

1) the downfall of Tom Delay

2) the website Crooks and Liars

3) #2 for bringing me Jack Cafferty ( I don't have the cable, so when I'm in a hotel or flying JetBlue I'm like a moth to a flame, salivating at the heaping piles of televisual goodness...)- and I love the smack down Cafferty gives "the Hammer."


Cafferty on Delay: "cocky little bandy rooster"
Jack Cafferty had a few choice words for Tom Delay today on "The Situation Room."

Video-WMP Video-QT (h/t arnie)

Cafferty: "Wolf all the tough talk was reduced to, "I quit!" To borrow a phrase from Roberto Duran, " No Mas." Mr. Delay suddenly became another disgraced public servant who couldn't take the heat." He would strut around on capitol hill like a cocky little, bandy rooster, but today he slithered away from Congress...


Delay does have a strange, strutty, assholic walk, doesn't he? Like some kind of effete Southern dandy... a lady boy...

Hey man, you can't just cut and paste whole sections from another blog. That's not very bloggy.

Oh great. You're back. Who let you in here?

You have to write your own material- express yourself, give us your take on-

Excuse me, slacker, but I'm at WORK right now, ok?

You're blogging at work?

I'm trying to.

Oh, well that's cool. Carry on, my wayward son. There'll be a post when you are done...

Grow up.

2007 Chevy Tahoe!

Check out the commercial I made for the Earth-murdering Chevy Tahoe!


It's here.


Then go make your own!



Cassandra stayed up all night Friday making tons of these- read all about it and see others here.

creative website, grim reminder

Found this via The Map Room:


Iraq Coalition Fatality Map

A dramatic and effective animated Flash map that illustrates casualties suffered by coalition forces in Iraq over time: “The animation runs at ten frames per second — one frame for each day — and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred. Each dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot which fades to black over the span of 30 frames/days, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war.” Via Boing Boing.

gizmatron

got the gizmatron started

weekender

what, are you only going to blog on the weekends?

maybe- what's the big deal

you're not very bloggy

what's that supposed to mean?

you don't share your every thought, opinion, flight of fancy of everyday

you're right, i don't - is there some kind of rule

yes. the bloggy rule

rules. that's why I stopped aspiring to be some kind of punk rocker when I was a lad... when I moved to the big city it seemed like the punks and such had rules... yawn

but...

but nothin- don't tell me how to blog and I won't tell you how to breathe, ok? so what if I only get to it on the weekends. i take nice pictures, like this one of the garage i really need to clean- peer into my secret world, my lair, my workshop, my headquarters- if you dare:

but THIS past weekend, it was work work work

cassansdra marched with Paul Haggis in Hollywood- I had to work- saturday and sunday- but i really didn't mind it too much- got the OT, and the DT (not the delerium tremens, silly- the DOUBLE TIME) - left work @ 2:00am Monday- was back by 7! wee!

who's the lucky sumbitch who got to go to DELAWARE this weekend?

KRUKWORLD!

No matter how bad things get, I can always punch the coordinates into the old navicomputer, make the jump, and take a trip to KRUKWORLD.

Which is a lot like Poland.

Won't you join me?

Troops out of Iraq in 2007?

Kos has this:

UK, US to withdraw Iraq forces by early '07

by DarkSyde

Sat Mar 04, 2006 at 06:05:40 PM PDT

Via The Next Hurrah: UK, US to withdraw Iraq forces by early '07:

[Link] The United States and Britain are planning to pull all their troops out of Iraq by the spring of 2007, two British newspapers reported in their Sunday editions, quoting unnamed senior defense ministry sources.
The Sunday Telegraph said the planned pull-out followed an acceptance by the two governments that the presence of foreign troops in Iraq was now a large obstacle to securing peace.

(I particularly liked:)

Two observations if this does play out: 1) Murtha was right, 2) The Republicans Lost the War.


If this is true, why not pull them our now? I really do believe we are only staying in Iraq becuase of the ego of one spoiled man. Same reason we went in.

Gary Snyder quote

All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says... master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than the other, each can be quite boring, and they each have the virtuous quality of repetition.

Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick- don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our "practice" which will put us on a "path" - it is our path.

-Gary Snyder The Practice of the Wild

apocalypto

no not mel gibson's upcoming New World drama about a boy and his amazing 200 ft. robot friend...


i mean the word i've just made up for myself to classify a certain type ephemera i find that is linked to my nervous fascination with the End Times...

so on boingboing there's this story about one apocalypsist's utopia, Thunder Mountain.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Outsider architect photo gallery of Thunder Mountain
Tinselman posted about a bizarre survivalist compound in Imlay, Nevada dubbed Thunder Mountain.

Frank Van Zant's vision was sparked when he heard the prophecy of a medicine woman: "In the final days there shall rise up a place called Thunder Mountain." She also told him that only those who lived at Thunder Mountain would survive the coming apocalypse. Van Zant wasted no time; he changed his name to Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain, moved his family to the desert in Imlay, Nevada, and began to build his monument.

At age 69 Van Zant committed suicide because he had finally completed his masterpiece.

Link



OH- and AM 1150 listeners in Los Angeles: Those anti-drug PSA's they are playing, where one kid asks another kid "wanna get high?" or "wanna light up?" or " wanna spark up a dube?" or "wanna blow a fatty?" or somesuch?

Totally makes me want to. Everytime.