Projecting Our Images

[rain_gryphon]

There's a Bigfoot outbreak in Arizona.

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People are apparently killing stringrays in reaction to Steve Irwin's death. Someone on a board I'm on said that would probably happen, but I dismissed the idea, thinking that people who were fans of Irwin would at least be sympathetic to animals.

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Penis Pumps in the News!

Man goes berserk over unpurchased penis pump!.

Judge enjoys his penis pump a bit too much!

Thief steals a penis pump!

Man would rather be mistaken for a terrorist than 'fess up to having a penis pump!

UPDATE!!! The penis pump of doom!

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I made more pickles today - this time they're garlic dills. Now I have to wait patiently for my pickles to age...

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Vodka testing. Personally, I've never really accepted the idea that it's possible to discern any difference among unflavoured vodkas. They're water with ethanol. Any trace fractions are going to be so overwhelmed by the alcohol that it should be impossible to taste them. I'd like one sample to have been reagent water blended with reagent ethanol, just to see how they'd characterize it.

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Keith Olbermann has a point:

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics.

It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President—and those around him—did that.

While I disagree with his criticism of the Iraq war, which I strongly feel was and is a necessary fight, he's correct in that Bush threw away national unity for the sake of politics, primarily his domestic initiatives. Lincoln and Roosevelt put those off until the war was won. They didn't have Karl Rove whispering in their ear, though.

If I were offered a pro-war Democrat, I'd certainly vote for one. I doubt I'll have that choice, though.

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Some guy from Michigan destroyed his garage in a Bear roasting debacle. Bears aren't ordinarily one of the animals that I'd consider a food source. When I was looking for recipes for pickle canning, though, I did come across a document published by OSU (they of the numerous football riots) that detailed how to can Bear meat, so evidently they are eaten as more than a novelty.

Comments

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

I thought Olbermann was right on when he said it was 'shameful' that, 5 years later, the WTC site is still an open wound. As soon as that space was cleared and we found out definitively what made the old towers vulnerable, new ones, outwardly identical in appearance, should have started being built without further delay. Can anyone doubt that, if just one tower had collapsed, it would have been rebuilt? Of course it would. The very fact that we are going to build something different on that site will be a concrete acknowledgement that the terrorists succeeded in their destructive and murderous plot...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

That's entirely correct as well.

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

Interesting phrasing in the New Zealand story:

"...if this guy has taken the penis pump then it is unlikely to stand up in court."

Hmmm...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

*snerk* I missed that :)

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

If I were offered a pro-war Democrat, I'd certainly vote for one.

I don't believe that you would, because you didn't when you had the chance.

Unlike Dean, both Kerry and Edwards were in favour of the Iraq war. In fact, they were in favour of increasing the numbers of troops there just to get things finished (something the Republicans have done the opposite of, with the opposite effect).

I think the only reason that anyone who buys into it believes that Bush is somehow better for your security than his opponents is because once a year he stands on a pile of rubble in New York City and says that he is. So you can criticize this tactic all you want, but at the end of the day, it is still working just fine.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

http://xolo.livejournal.com/2004/11/03/

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Good choice? :-P
You made me totally forget that. But it sounds like you forgot that too.
I'll just wonder what you're trying to say from now on, I guess.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

You're misread that, I think. My theory in '04 wasn't that Kerry was pro-war, but that Bush, like Kerry, was also in favour of talking to the terrorists rather than killing them, so that in terms of foreign policy, they might as well be clones. I voted on domestic issues, primarily marriage and states' rights. I note with no satuafction that I was right, and Oliver was wrong - Bush had no intention whatever of doing anything substantive about Iran after the election. He's too busy pandering to the basest elements of the Republican party.

I stand pretty much where I've stood for the past five years. In order for the blessings of civilization to endure, the West must be ascendant. Unless that happens, we'll slowly sink back into want and barbarism, and all the civil rights in the world won't dig us out of that hole. My remark about pro-war Democrats was made largely from frustration, as I doubt that such a thing exists anymore.

I'm quite ready to vote away my right to marry, to adopt children, or anything else, if it will help civilization endure. I know that in the long term, these things will come to pass anyway in a securre, wealthy society. I know as well that if Islam triumphs, everything is lost forever.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

OK, yeah I misread that. I guess I just don't see the middle-east as the same kind of a threat as you do. The threat is there, but I see it as being a more manageable level of threat: not at the level of survival being threatened. Believe me, I would be every bit in favour of pulling out all the stops as you are if I thought it had come to a threat of survival. I think you're right in that rights of equality inevitably come to pass... in the western world, anyway. And by the same reasoning, we're not going to sink into barbarism no matter what Muslim extremists do, as that's not the direction that things go in the long term, not unless we force it by deliberately sinking to the level of those who attack us.

So, that's why what I would most rather see is that no matter what the US must do or thinks it must do, that it does it without compromising those values the way it has - because things are not desperate enough to warrant such compromises.

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who realizes that so far Kerry has been the only candidate (with a chance) that has publically denounced what Saudi Arabia is doing? This is why I voted for him over Bush. Iraq is not our problem. Iran is annoying, but not entirely our problem. Saudi is our problem. They are our fault, and OUR responsibility to fix.