I’ve always thought that the hardest thing to write is an introduction, or in my vernacular, a first paragraph. I ought to take lessons from Chris Ayres of the London Times, who recently wrote an article that opened with this:
“WHEN A BULL whale comes at you with an erect
penis, it’s nine feet long,” said Gregory Colbert, aiming a fork at his
Caesar salad. “It’s like a torpedo. And you’d better get out of the
way, fast.”
Just grabs you doesn’t it?
The fact that one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction was code named ”Curveball’ was probably a good hint that his intelligence wasn’t so, well, intelligent. In an article in the LA Times Curveball’s handlers, all senior officials from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), claim that "the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq."
In light of what we’ve been learning lately about some of the president’s folks, maybe they felt Curveball was a kindred spirit. After all, his handlers "said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental
problems. ‘He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND
official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal
person,’ agreed a BND analyst." Sounds like he’d fit right in working with Rove & Company.
You know, with news like this who needs fiction?
A company based in Rhode Island called AmBio has come up with a cool use for 802.11b (i.e. WiFi) technology. They’re hooking their Mosquito Magnets up to a network that will create a kind of invisible fence for mosquitos around things like golf courses. From the story:
We got the idea from institutions that were jury-rigging our
technology to computer networks and mesh networks, with PC panels, to
see how many mosquitoes they’d caught or how much propane they had
left…It’s unbelievable the lengths people will go to, to get rid of
mosquitoes," said Hosea, a former National Science Foundation Fellow in
artificial intelligence."We’ve meshed a great mosquito-catching machine with a computer
technology on top of it, and wireless network technology on top of
that, and then turned it into a great defensive shield against
mosquitoes coming into your habitat," he said.
I sure hope they come up with a home version so we can enjoy our deck in months when the temperature actually gets above 80 degrees.
I added the Google Adsense bar to the right side of this blog a week or two ago. In that time they show me as generating 880+ page views with exactly zero click-throughs. Yikes.
As a consequence I’ve deferred my retirement plans by another 20 years and am now re-evaluating my get-rich-by-blogging strategy. I’m considering the following:
I think that’s it. I’ll use this blog to launch my career as a syndicated-everyman-columnist. Now you might be concerned that savvy editors could find this type of content by merely surfing the internet and finding blogs just like mine, but your concern would be misplaced. With the rare exception of fine editors like our friend John Robinson at the Greensboro New & Record the editors at today’s newspapers don’t have a clue what’s out there. It’ll be like selling candy to a baby.
Now if I could just find my first original thought.
I saw this picture on Patrick Eakes’ blog. In my case I’d substitute our dog, Arthur, for the puppy. I’ve been looking for a way to get rid of that beast for years.
Most of us long ago learned to think of that strange breed of human known as the "lawyer" with a certain degree of disgust. Following are eight stories that serve as further proof of the nefariousness of this breed, as if we need more proof. All eight of these stories appeared this week.
There’s an interesting item you can find here about a blog that was started for a public agency in Orlando, Florida. The blog had a brief life until it was ordered shut down by the powers-that-be, apparently because they didn’t like the criticism they were getting. Imagine that; public officials that don’t like criticism.
There’s a piece in the Guardian (via Blog on the Run) that features an interview with a 107-year old veteran of WWI. You can read the whole thing here, but here’s an excerpt:
We got as far as their
second line and four Germans stood up. They didn’t get up to run away,
they got up to fight. One of them came running towards me. He couldn’t
have had any ammunition or he would have shot me, but he came towards
me with his bayonet pointing at my chest. I fired and hit him in the
shoulder. He dropped his rifle, but still came stumbling on. I can only
suppose that he wanted to kick our Lewis gun into the mud, which would
have made it useless. I had three live rounds left in my revolver and
could have killed him with the first. What should I do? I had seconds
to make my mind up. I gave him his life. I didn’t kill him. I shot him
above the ankle and above the knee and brought him down. I knew he
would be picked up, passed back to a PoW camp, and at the end of the
war he would rejoin his family.Six
weeks later, a countryman of his killed my three mates. If that had
happened before I met that German, I would have damn well killed him.
But we never fired to kill. My Number One, Bob, used to keep the gun
low and wound them in the legs – bring them down. Never fired to kill
them. As far as I know he never killed a German. I never did either.
Always kept it low…On September 21, the
night I was wounded, the battalion had been relieved at 10 o’clock and
we were going back over open ground to the support line. The shell that
got us was what we called a whizz-bang, which burst amongst us. The
force of it threw me to the floor, but I didn’t realise I’d been hit
for a few minutes. The burning hot metal knocks the pain out of you at
first but I soon saw blood, so I put a field dressing on it. Then the
pain started.I
didn’t know what had happened to the others at first, but I was told
later that I had lost three of my mates. That shell killed Numbers
Three, Four and Five. We were a little team together, and those men who
were carrying the ammunition were blown to pieces. I reacted very
badly. It was like losing a part of my life. It upset me more than
anything. We had only been together four months, but with hell going on
around us, it seemed like a lifetime.I’d
got this piece of shrapnel right in the groin. It was about two inches
long, half an inch thick, with a jagged edge. I was taken to a dressing
station and I lay there all that night and the next day, until the
evening. The wound had been cleaned and they had smeared it with
something to keep the lice away. When the doctor came to see me, he
could actually see the shrapnel."Would
you like me to take that out of your leg?" he asked, but added quickly,
"Before you answer ‘Yes’, there’s no anaesthetic in the camp. None
whatever. It’s been used on people more badly wounded than you are.
Yours is only a scratch." So I thought for a minute or two, and said,
"How long will you be?" He said, "A couple of minutes." So I said,
"Carry on." Four fellows grabbed me – one on each arm and one on each
leg – and I can feel that bloody knife even now, cutting out that
shrapnel. When he pulled it out, the doctor asked me if I wanted to
keep the shrapnel as a souvenir. Officer or not, I swore at him, "I’ve
had the bloody thing too long already. Throw it away!"…Last year I went back
to Ypres, where I met one of the last surviving German veterans of the
war, Charles Kuentz, who was 107. It was very emotional. We had both
been on the same battlefield at Pilckem Ridge. For a while I hadn’t
wanted to meet him, but I got a letter from him in Germany and he
seemed like a nice man and I decided I would meet him. He was a nice
man and we talked, then we both sat in silence, staring out at the
landscape. Both of us remembering the stench, the noise, the gas, the
mud crusted with blood, the cries of the fallen comrades. We had both
fought because we were told to. Sadly, he died a year after I met him.Why
should the British government call me up and take me out to a
battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t
speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table.Now
what is the sense in that? It’s just an argument between two
governments. Neither Charles nor I ever want any other young man ever
to go through what we did again, but still we send our lads to war. In
Iraq, our young men are being killed and told to kill.I
don’t think it is possible to truly explain the bond that is forged
between a soldier in the trenches and his fellow soldiers. There you
all are, no matter what your life in civvy street, covered in lice,
desperately hungry, eking out the small treats – the ounce of tobacco,
the biscuit. You relied on him and he on you, never really thinking
that it was just the same for the enemy. But it was. It was every bit
as bad.
There’s an item on PressThink written by the woman who writes/runs H20town, a blog for and about Watertown, MA. It’s an interesting look at the motivations and rewards for someone who’s not a professional journalist but provides hyperlocal coverage of her town’s business anyway. She brings up some great points about how people like herself aren’t necessarily motivated in the same way that industry "pros" are, and she also asks some good questions about the future of the news business.
The "Alcatraz" of this post’s title is my beautiful home in which my wife and I are imprisoned with our children. The "Turd Man" is yours truly. Why, you may ask, am I the "Turd Man?" I am the "Turd Man" because I have this amazing propensity for being the one person in the house who finds stopped up toilets. Yesterday alone I discovered two.
Is there anything grosser than walking into the bathroom to relieve yourself only to flip up the toilet lid and find a coagulated glop of turd and TP stuck at the bottom of a bowl of tea-colored water? It’s doubly horrific if you’re unprepared. You’re assaulted at a moment of vulnerability (i.e. you’re about to pee your pants) and now you have to hunt down the plunger which is never in the same bathroom with the turd-wadded toilet. Then you have to plunge it vigorously enough that you make a bit of a mess and then you have to clean up. Only then can you find personal relief. (I forgot to mention that in my house you are destined to find the blocked toilet at exactly the same time that all the other restrooms are being used by the houses other occupants, one of whom has created the turd bomb with which you are dealing).
This phenomenon has increased in frequency due to two recent developments in our home. First, my children have reached the age where they actually find the idea of touching a turd, even their own, quite gross. So they wad up half a roll of toilet paper in their hand each time they take a swipe at their offending bottom. Thus you have the prime ingredient for a turd-ball: a full roll of paper entwined with what can only be described as a cannonball of personal ballast. Second you have the recent installation of the new, government-mandated, eco-friendly toilets. You have to flush these things 26 times after you pee, so it’s no wonder that my kids are so adept at flooding them.
Still, how hard is it to check to make sure that your flush has succeeded? Apparently it’s too much for the other inmates of the Lowder asylum, so upon discovery of the second turd-ball I let loose with a stream of expletives that would have made the inmates at the original Alcatraz proud. My children, drawn to the disturbance like moths to a flame, came to the bathroom door to see if their father’s head would explode this time around. Upon seeing them I said something like "When you guys take a poop why can’t you make sure it actually goes down? I mean look at the size of this turd? Who’s turd is this?"
At this point they were trying desperately not to laugh. Their not-so-cherubic-anymore faces turned bright red and their turd-laying bodies shook as they tried to hold in the giggles, but when I let loose with the first emphasized "turd" they started losing it and when I asked who’s turd it was they just started laughing hysterically. Well, damnit, I couldn’t hold my anger and I started cracking up too. I guess a word like "turd" has that effect on people.
Anyway, as a result I’m implementing a new household fine for anyone who leaves a floater for Dad to discover. I figure if I have to be the "Turd Man" I may as well get paid for the anguish.
