Category Archives: Uncategorized

Neat!

Found, lost for over 150 years, then found again:
SAQQARA, Egypt - Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old “missing pyramid” that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an [...]

Good News

It looks like D.C. Thornton is un-retiring himself, and resuming blogging tomorrow.

A script to read

I haven’t been reading as many movie scripts as I really should, but thanks to Simply Scripts, I came across a gem and I’ve got to share it.
I’ve only read most of the first act, but even just that far, I can tell you that Roughshod is very well-written, keeping you interested scene by scene [...]

Quote of the moment

They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.
— Peggy Noonan, 30 May 2008

ZOMFG!!!!11! Bush is getting TOTALLY pwnd by his former press sec!!!!!!!

Jay Rosen over at PressThink, never one to hide his biases or check his premises, has gone rather overboard with the upcoming release of Scott McClellan’s new (assertion-heavy, but apparently evidence-free) book, all but cackling and rubbing his hands with glee, the very picture of a fourteen-year-old girl who finally, finally has found someone who [...]

Quote of the moment (environmentalism edition)

The idea of nature’s intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and [...]

Find out when you should die! (You know — for kids!)

I recently said, in conversation, that environmentalism, as a movement and an ideology, is driven by hatred of man, and used a paraphrased quote from David Graber to illustrate my point. The genuine quote is: “Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the [...]

And suddenly, I don’t miss John F. Kerry quite so much

Barack Obama, on Memorial Day:
On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Quote of the Moment

Places yet remain in the continental United States to which news of the world barely penetrates. Paradise Inn, 5400 feet up the south slope of Mount Rainier, has no Internet connections. The rooms have no radios or TV’s. There used to be a television in the bar, but the bar has been demolished to make [...]

Quote of the Moment

My Francophilia took a hit this morning when the femme de chambre at my hotel said to me, You want more soap? But I gave you soap yesterday.
— Erica Abeel, Filmmaker Magazine blog, 18 May 2008

Wow

Upon learning the “secret” of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, I thought he could not possibly deliver a movie more heavy-handed, insulting to the audience, or just outright stupid in conception.
Holy crow, was I ever wrong.
I had some small hope for The Happening. But read the part of that review you have to highlight, [...]

Upbeat (with no cynicism)

To make up for the previous post, here’s Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Just Wild About Harry”:
powered by ODEO
If Odeo is being wonky, which it seems to be at this moment, you can download the Vorbis file.

Disputing a nonverbal response

Instapundit links a post at The Volokh Conspiracy with the following quote, and his only comment is “HMM“:
There are lots of methodologies and modes of thought that are widely acceptable within at least some circles of academia, but would strike an uninitiated outside observer as nonsensical, academically dishonest, or otherwise discreditable.
Anyone who has ever encountered [...]

About time, too!

Via the Online Books Page I find that a ten-volume edition of The Works of Victor Hugo is now online, which means that, at last, Ninety-Three, arguably his best book, is available for download.
It’s in Volume VII, if you only want to read that.
Now if only Gutenberg would get Frank Spearman’s works up more quickly…

Annoyance

I upgraded to Xubuntu 8.04 a week ago, and things have gone pretty well so far. Firefox 3 Beta 5, for instance, is muuuuuuuch nicer in a low-RAM environment than its predecessor.
How. Ever.
On a lark, I popped in a copy-protected DVD, just to see if the upgrade jogged whatever was wrong before loose, [...]