BLATHER REVIEW

Time Suck of the Day

Crikey, but this stole I dunno how many hours of my life. Fascinating read.

Another silly movie scene

I threw this one together just to show my 13-year-old nephew how to do it. He got a good chuckle out of it.

UPDATE: Disco Guy Again.

Behind the Scenes

With appologies, I take the liberty of showing you what you didn't see over at Annika's. Mwheh.

Short People Got No Reason To Live... In Jail?

Holy $#!%.

LINCOLN, Neb. — A judge's decision to sentence a 5-foot-1 man to probation instead of prison for sexually assaulting a child has angered crime victim advocates who say the punishment sends the wrong message.
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But supporters of short people say it's about time someone recognizes the unique challenges they face.

Here's a unique challenge for ya: Stop breakin' the law, A$$hole!!!

Cheyenne County District Judge Kristine Cecava issued the sentence Tuesday. She told Richard W. Thompson that his crimes deserved a long prison sentence but that he was too small to survive in a state prison.
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Though he could have been sentenced to 10 years behind bars, he ended up with 10 years of probation instead. On Thursday, the state's attorney general, Jon Bruning, promised to appeal within two weeks, calling the sentence far too lenient.

Gee, do ya think?!

But Joe Mangano, secretary of the National Organization of Short Statured Adults, agreed with the judge's assessment that Thompson would face dangers while in prison because of his height.
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"I'm assuming a short inmate would have a much more difficult time than a large inmate," said Mangano, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall. "It's good to see somebody looking out for someone who is a short person."

And just how tall was that child that Little Dick Thompson was **ahem** "looking out for"?

Thompson, 50, had sexual contact over a couple of months last year with a 12-year-old girl, said Sidney Police Chief Larry Cox. He was sentenced on two felony sexual assault charges.
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[....]
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Thompson's attorney, Donald Miller, had no comment on the ruling.

Probably thwapped speechless that his client actually got off without so much as time enough to make a single license plate.

The judge's reasoning confounded Amy Miller, legal director for the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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"I have never heard of anything like this before," she said.
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No one has ever come to the ACLU to complain of height discrimination, she said. And using Thompson's height as a reason to avoid sending him to prison is surprising, because neither the U.S. nor state constitution provides protections based on physical stature, she said.

Since when has that ever stopped one of our self-appointed members of the Black-Robed Draconian Order™? Judge Cecava didn't need to consult the Law. She just needed a nice big swatch of whole cloth.

A spokesman for the prison system said Thompson's height would not put him at risk among the state's 4,400 inmates. There are protections available in prison to help inmates who feel threatened, prison spokesman Steve King said, but to his knowledge, no one has ever taken advantage of them based on fears related to their height.
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"He's not the shortest guy we have in prison," King said. "We've got some short guys that are as tough as nails. We've got people from all ages, physical stature of all sizes, in general population."

Oh, come on now. You know that has nothing to do with Grampa Thompson's penchant for pre-adolescent girls. You're in Kristine Cecava's Court!

State Sen. Ernie Chambers, a longtime critic of judges, said he was baffled by the sentence.
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"If shortness is an excuse and protection from going to prison, short people ought to rob banks and do everything else they would wind up going to prison for," Chambers said. "We're talking here about a crime committed against a child, and shortness is not a defense."

Seems most people's common sense isn't coming up short. And I've got just one final thing to say to the Letch of Lincoln. Come on, sing it with me! "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time...no. Don't do it..."

Rayburn Building Conspiracy Theory -- You Heard It Here First!

Okay, so Speaker Hastart declared that, due to the seperation of powers, Congressional offices are off limits to the FBI, right?

So now there's a report of "gunshots" and the smell of gunpowder in the Rayburn Office Building and the Capital Police are investigating, right?

But who else is in the building? The FBI's "Terrorism Task Force"!

Most members of congress and their staffs have already left for the Memorial Day weekend, and the people who are in the building were advised to stay where they were while the "Terrorism Task Force" (wink wink) searches the building for an alleged gunman.

Sound familiar? There was that little plan of G Gordon Liddy's, 35 years ago, where he wanted to pull a fire alarm at the Brookings Institute and, while the building was evacuated, the Plumbers would enter the building dressed as firemen and search some offices for who knows what.

They never went through with that plan. Has the Department of Justice pulled off what the ol' Plumbers never did?

I'm just thinking out loud here. ;)

Jesse's got a new job

Heh.

Another Day, Another Fraud Exposed by the Blogosphere

Allah's got a round-up of blog posts about a new video of an interview with one Jesse MacBeth, who is alledgedly a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq for 16 months. The MilBloggers are all over this guy.

I can't really add to what you'll read in Allah's links, or the links from the links. But, I just gotta point out my favorite discrepency. MacBeth is wearing the same shirt in the video that he wore in the photo on the wall which was supposedly taken several years ago while he was still in the service.

Photo on the wall:

MacBeth in the interview:

What an assclown.

One thing that I caught was that, early in the interview, he mentions Osan Air Base in South Korea. But, he seems to pronounce it "Osank". A minor discrepency, perhaps, but I just wanted to have a unique observation to add to what everybody else is chiming in with, mwheh.

UPDATE: BLATHER REVIEW EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT BLATHER REVIEW!

Thanks to a comment in a thread at Protein Wisdom, I was directed here. There, you can view a picture of every Ranger class from 1952 to the present.

Jesse MacBeth seemed to indicate that he joined the Army after 9-11 and was a part of the first wave of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He claims to have entered Ranger school just after basic training and, all-in-all, served from 2001-2005. Still, with Army basic training lasting 9 weeks and Ranger training lasting 14 weeks (over 5 months total), I looked at the graduation photos beginning with May '01 and going right through to June of '03.

Just when I was sure that I wasn't going to find his face in any of those class pictures I saw it: my tube of Pringles potato crisps. I popped a few in my mouth and munched away and realized that I can say with 97% certainty that Jesse MacBeth was never an Army Ranger.

(I leave a 3% possibility open only because some of those classes were quite large and the photo was taken from a distance that makes the graduates' faces a bit hard to make out. But I kept clicking back and forth -- with loupe in hand -- from the Ranger page to the video capture just to reaquaint myself with his face.)

I say, emphatically, that he's nowhere to be found in these Ranger School class photos.

Not that that's actually news at this point...

Maybe I'm a little bit pregnant

So anyway, last night I had a craving for lettuce and cucumbers soaked in vinegar. Oh, yeah. Then I had a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Oh, that was goooood.

Then I went to bed a dreamt that Jonah Goldberg was asking me to try to get the phone number of some gal who had tickets to an event observing the fifth anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's death. Very strange.

Bombay TV, pt 2

A Tragic Scene.

Bombay TV

Now here's something different. Everybody's doing it and I wanna be different, too. So check out my short movie scene here.

UPDATE: This one's much sillier. You gotta watch it more than once, though. It gets funnier with each play. :)

Of piss and moan

If you own a home then you probably receive a quarterly water bill. At least, you do if you own a home in Connecticut.

So anyway, one fine evening a bunch of us were having conversation over dinner when -- and I don't remember how it came up -- my buddy Tex Kaliber, who learned everything he knows about plumbing from his father, said, "When you think about it, every bathroom in every home in America is a ladies' room.".

His wife, Ta'dah!, gasped, "Whaddaya mean?!"

Tex said, "Well, a 'men's room' oughta have a urinal."

Ta'dah! said, "But do you really want a urinal in our bathroom?"

Tex said, "Oh, I'd LOVE to have a urinal in our bathroom."

Ta'dah! said, "Ewww! Why?!"

Tex said, "Because it takes a pint-and-a-half of water to flush a urinal. It takes TWO GALLONS to flush a toilet."

Ta'dah! looked away sheepishly and said, "Oh. Yeah..."

Maybe, if we had urinals in our bathrooms, we could all save on our water bills and, finally, quit having to appologize for leaving the seat up. Just a thought.

Of laws and resolutions

The conduct of the illegal immigrants is a threat to the authority of the United States... The executive branch has answered decades of Congressional legislation with decades of defiance. The federal government now faces a test, and the United States a difficult and defining moment. Are the laws of the United States to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United States' legislative and executive branches serve the purpose of their founding, or will they be irrelevant?

---paraphrase of President Bush's address to the United Nations, 12 Sept 02

My Cat The Puppy

Stinky is that rare cat that actually comes when you call him. He also has a habit of getting lost if we let him roam around outside. (Well, it's not really a "habit" -- it's only happened three times in the past four years.) About two weeks ago it was dinner time and no Stinky in sight. Stinky never misses dinner. Housemate Chris found him -- after a half-hour search -- about fifteen houses away on the long street a block south of us. So, we have a new rule: Do not let Stinky outside alone.

Yesterday afternoon I let the dog out and, as usual, Stinky came running and slipped out and onto the back porch. Since he hadn't been outside in -- to my knowledge -- a few days, I let him walk around the side of the house and up the pathway toward my landlady's house. He stopped to try and chew on some long blades of grass. (Since he has no teeth it was an act of pure optomism...) I leaned over and petted him just to discourage him from trotting off to parts unknown. Once you start petting him he'll never want it to stop.

Chris was arriving home and coming down the driveway toward the pathway and gave me a look that said "Oooookay, just don't him out of your sight...". I said "Do you wanna take him in?". He said "Are you leaving?". I said "Just going around the corner to the deli." Chris called "Come on, Stinky, this way." Stinky looked up at me and asked "Meow?". I pointed and tried to get him to follow Chris but he wasn't understanding that. So I basically walked him back down the pathway to the front door and guided him in. Then I went to the store.

There's that old phrase: "This is like herding cats." Well, if all cats were like Stinky, herding cats would be as easy as cutting cheese.

Mmmmmmmmm. Cheeeeeese...

What a long strange trip it's been

In the Middle East, 100 million people in the Arab countries, many of whom have considered us their enemy for nearly 20 years, now look on us as their friends. We must continue to build on that friendship so that peace can settle at last over the Middle East and so that the cradle of civilization will not become its grave.
-- Richard Nixon; August 8th, 1974

And it's just a beginning, always...

Huh?

Eleanor Clift remembers Ronald Reagan having "orange hair". I don't think I'd put too much stock in her recollection of 1980, and how it might bode well for Hillary Clinton.

"I was trying to think, who in my lifetime has been such a dominant frontrunner and yet people had been nervous about his electability - and I came up with Ronald Reagan," Clift told the Fox News Channel's "Fox and Friends" on Sunday.
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The Newsweek scribe noted that Reagan "was the oldest person, at that time, to try to contest for the presidency as a frontrunner."
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"He was a grade-B movie actor," she said, failing to mention Reagan's two terms as governor of the nation's largest state. "He had orange hair. And a lot of Republicans worried that he couldn't be elected."
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"And look what happened," Clift said, referring to Reagan's two electoral landslides.

Mm hmm.

once upon another timeline

DEN FEMTE MAJ

If all this illegal alien protesting business has you wondering if you really wanna celebrate Cinco de Mayo today, just take a look at Emperor Misha's preferred reason to hoist a few pints.

After a great story about his grandmother and some German soldiers, His Rottiness says:

May 5th, 1945, the end of more than 5 years of Nazi occupation, thanks to the heroic sacrifices of the allied soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought the brutal bastards until their Nazi asses had been thoroughly stomped into the ground.
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Every May 5th I remember that, and every May 5th I send up a prayer and a thank you to all of those who fought and died so that I might grow up free.
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I didn’t grow up in a free country thanks to protesters screaming “one, two, three, four, we don’t want your filthy war!”
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I didn’t grow up in a free country thanks to poets, playwrights, authors, “bravely dissenting” columnists or “the loyal opposition.”
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I grew up in a free country thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of men in uniform, men risking everything they were and ever would be for people they didn’t even know.
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THERE’S a debt that I can never possibly repay.

So, if you're so inclined, skip the Corona and have a Tuborg or a Carlsberg instead, and give a toast or two or three to the American, British and Canadian soldiers who fought and freed Denmark from Nazi rule so that, 60 years later, they could publish any and all cartoons that they damn well pleased.

[Note: Thanks to Misha for translating Fifth of May into Danish for me. He also notes that, in Denmark, today is usually refered to as "the liberation" or, in Danish, "befrielsen".]

Note to a Commie Wannabe

And he was also a brutal murderous thug who deserved it.

(This post inspired by this intriguing post. I forget where I swiped that .gif from.)

Ghost Story

Susie posts about a minor mystery at work, and she got my memory joggin'. I could tell you couple of firsthand "ghost stories" myself, but then you might think I'm weird(er). So, instead, I'll tell you a story that a friend of mine told me about 15 years ago.

Pat was sitting at his kitchen table in a small 1-bedroom condo that he owned in the same building where I had my condo. I forget what he said he was doing at the time. Writing, painting, something like that. He decided that he wanted to sit in a comfortable chair that he had in his bedroom, rather than the standard kitchen table chair that he was sitting in.

He got up, set the kitchen chair aside and started walking toward the bedroom, but stopped because he had to take whiz. He turned and went into the bathroom.

While in the bathroom, his cat Nelson let out a very strange meow. Pat came out of the bathroom and Nelson seemed fine, so he went on into the bedroom to get the chair.

The chair wasn't there.

In the dark about why the chair was missing -- perhaps his wife, Donna, had taken it somewhere -- Pat went back to the kitchen.

The comfy chair was sitting at the kitchen table, just where Pat was going to place it.

True story? I've never known Pat to be a B.S.er. Make of it what you will.

When Cats Attack, pt 2

About a month ago I wrote a post about Lewis, a cat who had attacked at least a half-dozen people in my neighboring town of Fairfield. Welp, there are some new developments

BRIDGEPORT — It began as a joke by a couple of college students. "Let's give Lewis the Cat a Web site," they said.

But now, the fashionable spaghetti strap and crew-neck shirts they're selling online bearing Lewis' likeness may be all that separates the infamous "Terrorist of Sunset Circle" from a death sentence.

Erin Reeves, a graduate student at Fairfield University, never dreamed she'd end up raising funds online to save Lewis' life when she first read about the cat's run-ins with the law in the Connecticut Post.

"It was just too funny," she said.

She and a friend decided to launch a profile for the Fairfield feline on Myspace.com. Within weeks Lewis had more than 500 MySpace "friends."

Meanwhile, Lewis' owner, Ruth Cisero, was in despair. Lewis, violating a court order, had escaped her home and attacked a female neighbor. Prosecutors offered Cisero an option: if she put Lewis to death, she'd get off with probation.

Cisero has vowed to prevent Lewis' euthanization, but further litigation would cost big bucks, which she said she doesn't have.

Enter Reeves.

"I went over to Ruth's house and got to meet Lewis and I found him to be the nicest, most gentle cat," she said. "I have cats of my own, and I know if someone told me I would have to euthanize one, I would be devastated."

And so, Save Lewis T-shirts were born. They're available online for about $20 at Café Press in several styles and sizes.

Mousepads are also available.

So far, 10 shirts have been sold. Reeves said proceeds of the sale of the shirts would be used for Lewis and Cisero's legal defense. Anything left over, she said, would be donated to charity.

Here's Lewis' MySpace site.