Hoosier Edward Bruce Tinsley, creator of the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, was arrested in Columbus Dec. 4 and charged with operating a vehicle under the influence — his second alcohol-related arrest in less that four months, according to the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department.
Tinsley, 48, who lives in Columbus, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.14 — almost twice the level at which an Indiana driver is considered intoxicated. He posted $755 bond.
On Aug. 26, Tinsley was arrested for public intoxication, according to the sheriff’s department.
Recovering from a weekend immersed in the indignities of air travel. At some point along the trip, I was reminded of an incident from a few years back, when we had to fly from New York to California for a wedding. My wife was eight months pregnant at the time, and on the return trip, I was begging the staffer at the Jet Blue counter to release a bulkhead seat for her. They weren’t assigned to other passengers yet, the airline was simply holding them back until the last minute, for reasons that I’m sure made sense to someone.
The young woman’s response: “Sir, pregnancy isn’t a medical condition — it’s a voluntary condition.” And she refused to release the seat.
Always wanted a chance to say: thanks for that, Jet Blue!
An over-exhaustive list of every last-minute holiday gift idea I have, except for the ones I forgot
Not gonna clutter up this page with it, but over at Puduland, I’ve posted a long list of cool things that somebody you adore might be happy to get. If you’re like me and you’ve barely even started thinking about the holidays, well, panic. But this might help.
The list ranges from stuff you’d expect (my own book, which I believe I may have mentioned, and Tom’s Hell In A Handbasket, which is right at the top of my list and would be even if I didn’t know the guy, honest) to classics (The Prisoner on DVD, which is starting to seem like a documentary these days) to great, often-underappreciated stuff by friends of mine I think anybody sane would like (The Egyptologist, E=MO2, Stellaluna, etc.)
Good luck. Just two more weeks, and we can all relax.
We return you know to your usual programming. Below this post, Jon once again tries not to forget the past. It’s like a thing with him.
Dennis Perrin examines the near-simultaneous passing of Augusto Pinochet and Jeane Kirkpatrick, here.
I’d forgotten this Jeane Kirkpatrick quote about the Maryknoll nuns raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard in 1980:
“The nuns were not just nuns, they were political activists, and we should be very clear about that.”
EVEN BETTER: During the eighties the U.S. encouraged Chilean arms manufacturers to help arm Saddam Hussein. This effort was spearheaded by a man now forgotten by history named Robert Gates.
[Lawrence] Eagleburger said…that when the group met with Bush, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”
The Iraq Study Group people shouldn’t take it personally, however. Bush apparently has never had any interest in Iraq. Here’s a passage from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:
On the afternoon of July 28 [2003], Tenet told [David] Kay he should sit in on the CIA’s daily morning briefing of the president the next day…
In the room with Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Tenet, Rice, Card and other aides…[Kay] couldn’t avoid the bottom line: He had found nothing. As for the trailers, he said they were probably not bioweapons labs, as the CIA had claimed.
Kay discerned no disappointment coming from Bush…the president seemed disengaged. “I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive,” Kay recalled. “He was interested but not posing any pressing questions.” Bush didn’t ask, Are you sure? He didn’t ask about the prospects of finding actual weapons. Or whether WMD had been hidden or spirited away.
It’s tempting to joke that Bush acts like this because there are no stupid questions, and thus he feels he shouldn’t ask any. But to be fair, there’s at least one subject that Bush really IS curious about:
Der Spiegel: With all your access to high-level sources, have you come across anyone who still thinks it is a good idea for the US to torture people?
Suskind: No. Most of the folks involved say that we made mistakes at the start. The president wants to keep all options open because he never wants his hands tied in any fashion…
Der Spiegel: So the average interrogator at a Black Site understands more about the mistakes made than the president?
Suskind: The president understands more about the mistakes than he lets on. He knows what the most-skilled interrogators know too. He gets briefed, and he was deeply involved in this process from the beginning. The president loves to talk to operators.
“He was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was constantly asking folks inside of CIA, ‘What’s happening with interrogations? Are these techniques working? Can we trust what we get?’ The president … is involved — some people say too involved — in the granular day-to-day grit of this war on terror.”
Not only is the president of the United States an eight year-old, he’s an unpleasant eight year-old, the kind you’d want the guidance counselors to keep an eye on.
Mandatory weekend reading. So excellent I’m surprised it’s only hidden behind a free registration wall, not the big fat subscription wall. A few choice excerpts:
It was the kind of day that lives mostly in Cleveland surfers’ fantasies. Pushed by the storm’s winds, water the color of chocolate milk rose 10 feet in the air before slamming onto a beach of boulders and logs. The temperature was 40 degrees and falling. One surfer, Vince Labbe, climbed onto his board only to get blown backward by 40-mile-an-hour winds…
Surfers learn to avoid ice chunks the size of bowling balls. Some wear goggles to surf through freezing rain, which can sting their eyes like needles. That is a bad idea, Mr. Labbe said, because the goggles freeze to their faces…
To reach the lake, surfers drag their boards across snowdrifts and beaches littered with used condoms and syringes, Mr. Ditzenberger said. The most popular surf spot is Edgewater State Park. It is nicknamed Sewer Pipe because, after heavy rains, a nearby water treatment plant regularly discharges untreated waste into Lake Erie.
A lot of people who read Trebekistan ask: if I still love Cleveland so much, why move to California?
Page A16, one paragraph: Entire Marine Food Chain Threatened
The recent news that global warming is likely to both (a) stifle the base of the marine food chain and (b) accelerate as it begins to disappear finally reached the Los Angeles Times this morning.
It’s on page A16, between a story on a black hole 4 billion light years away and the discovery by archaeologists of an ancient Roman imperial insignia.
Be sure to go back and read the stupidest thing ever written, produced by the Weekly Standard on April 21, 2003 (via Mahablog). It’s their 1000-word sneer about all the soft-brained tree-hugging peacenik Saddam-lovers who’d claimed this wasn’t going to be The Most Fun War Ever. For instance, it quotes what it calls “the world community of jackasses” saying preposterous things like:
“[I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself”—Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002
Wow, how humiliating to have said that.
But while it’s always tempting to sneer back at the 23 year-old Dartmouth Review alumni who produced this rancid offalicious brawn, I’m getting tired of that. The problem isn’t the individual pinheads who produced this. As my friend Rob says, they grow these people in vats. Maybe you could shame these particular ninnies into foreswearing all forms of communication with others until the day they die. But who cares? Rupert Murdoch would just go to the vats in the back and pluck a few freshly-hatched cretins.
In other words, the real problem is the International Army Of Killer Billionaires who own our media. When their lackeys write things like this, it isn’t some kind of “mistake.” They’ll never be fired for being nimrods, because being nimrods is the job for which the Killer Billionaires hired them.
Full disclosure: I own a few shares of Apple, because I’m a Mac user, and I’m in the cult. But does that mean I have a clue? Absolutely not. Let’s be clear about this.
So today I’m skimming the headlines, and I notice that Apple stock is down more than two percent today. I checked, and there’s unusually high volume, too.
Why?
Because of rumors.
Of a possible delay.
In the introduction of a product no one has ever seen.
