Kicking while they’re down
This is awesome.
Senator McCain says Iraq is so improved that the American commander can travel unarmed - but I’ve just returned from Iraq, and that’s ludicrous.
This is awesome.
Senator McCain says Iraq is so improved that the American commander can travel unarmed - but I’ve just returned from Iraq, and that’s ludicrous.
Hat tip to Nerfgun.
I like everything about this except the corny-ass ending, which is, I admit, probably not the response they were looking for.
My only quibble is that it’s not very helpful to those of us who are drunk 24/7…
ANYONE who has spent more than a few minutes over the last couple of weeks trolling tech blogs or cocktail lounges has probably heard about Mail Goggles, a new feature on Google’s Gmail program that is intended to help stamp out a scourge that few knew existed: late-night drunken e-mailing.
The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker can seem like the equivalent of bungee jumping without a cord.
…and she didn’t even do it.
Christopher Hitchens saw fit to defend George Bush’s war in Iraq when it was declared. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. Hitch has since, like so many journalists who actually want to be read, and therefore, paid, turned tail on Dubya faster than you can say “blood in the water”.
Indeed, it seems he’s actually got his shit together and become a smart writer again, rather than a mere contrarian. His latest rant on the financial meltdown is a good example. In it, he argues quite convincingly that the rot goes far deeper than the financial system.
Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.
And before we leave the theme of falls and collapses, I hope you read the findings of the Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration that followed the plunge of Interstate 35W in Minneapolis into the Mississippi River last August. Sixteen states, after inspecting their own bridges, were compelled to close some, lower the weight limits of others, and make emergency repairs. Of the nation’s 600,000 bridges, 12 percent were found to be structurally deficient. This is an almost perfect metaphor for Third World conditions: a money class fleeces the banking system while the very trunk of the national tree is permitted to rot and crash.
…
Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it. The most you can say is that some people have had to take a slightly early retirement, but a retirement very much sweetened by the wherewithal on which to retire. That doesn’t quite count. These are the rules that apply in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela, where the political big boys mimic what is said about our hedge funds and investment banks: the stupid mantra about being “too big to fail.”
Eminem has turned into the JD Salinger of mall hip-hop, but apparently he’s been busy lately. Straight from his compound, here’s the latest…and hell, it’s not bad!

One hell of a baritone
Levi Stubbs, lead singer of legendary Motown band The Four Tops, has died at his home in Detroit, US, aged 72.
The performer, who had suffered ill-health for several years, passed away in his sleep.