National Delurking Week

Chris at Creek Running North reminds us that it is National Delurking Week. Time to 'fess up folks. If there is anyone out there, please feel free to identify yourself in as much detail as you would like, then curse  us, praise us or laugh in our bloggish faces if you wish. From the visitor logs, I know we have a few regular visitors. Why not say hello?

Oh, but it was never about the oil.....

from Mother Jones:


Big Oil Wins Iraq's Petroleum Resources

The long discussed plan to hand over most of Iraq’s oil assets to big foreign oil companies is about to happen. When people can't figure out what Bush means when he claims victory in Iraq, this is what he is talking about.

According to the Independent, the companies are looking at terrific profit potentials. "The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972."

The plan envisions production sharing agreements among the oil companies and the Iraqi government. Such agreements are unusual in the Mideast. The production sharing agreements would run for 30 years with companies taking an initial 75 percent of all profits to cover costs and then 20 percent of all profits. According to the Independent that’s twice the industry average.

I, for one, feel so much safer.

via Boing Boing:



 

Retirement Gift for El Chimpo?

via the Houston Chronicle:

Flying banana may reach new artistic heights


Artist wants to float 1,000-foot balloon over Texas

The French gave us the Statute of Liberty, Mexico sort of gave us Texas and now Canada wants to give us a giant helium-filled yellow banana.

More specifically, Montreal artist Cesar Saez hopes to send a 1,000-foot long banana dirigible into the southern sky next year to make giant loops over the Lone Star State.

"I want to bring some humor to the Texas sky," said Saez, 38, well known in Quebec for his public works of art.

"It's an artistic statement and a spectacle. One thing I love is the issue of truth or hoax, and I love the ambiguity," said the Argentina-born artist. (more)

 

Great News

 From Rep. John Murtha's Blog:

I will be recommending to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense that we begin extensive hearings starting on January 17, 2007 that will address accountability, military readiness, intelligence oversight and the activities of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We will be demanding substantive answers to questions that have gone unanswered for far too long.

The war in Iraq and its effect on our military and our nation's future remains the most crucial issue facing the new Congress. I will be recommending an aggressive pursuit of action that will allow us to reduce our military presence in Iraq at the soonest practicable date.

Saddam's Dog executed

CORRECTION!:

from Our source, Inside the mind of a Geordie Monkey comes this retraction. Obviously, we retract the story as well.

Saddam Dog Faked
by The Trained Monkey on Thu 04 Jan 2007 08:11 GMT | Permanent Link
I posted a story about Saddam Dog being Executed last week,

I have now found that the story is FAKE.......the picture has been faked 




The photo is found on DOGS DESERVE BETTER website which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to freeing the chained dog, and bringing our ‘best friend’ into the home and family.

warning distressing pictures
the orginal picture is on http://www.dogsdeservebetter.com/pictures.html



the orginal picture is here
http://www.dogsdeservebetter.com/Assets/HangingDog4.jpg
Sorry.


(IMAGE REMOVED)



They killed his dog.

His DOG?

Why?

from Inside the Mind of a Geordie Monkey

Saddam's Dog executed

Shortly after the execution of the dictator Saddam Hussein, his dog Blondi followed the same fate to the gallows. Contrary to Saddam, Blondi’s execution was broadcast live in full length. Some minor complications arose, which dragged out the death struggle to unbearable lengths. Animal activist group PETA has filed a formal complaint to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.


warning the link is rather unpleasant. Despite extensive monitoring of iraqi media by the likes of the bbc, they seem to have ignored it.

 

Pat Robertson Disputed

from the comments at Eschaton:

Great - now my dog is talking in tongues and skooching a pentagram on the floor with her ass. I think the devil is getting ready to rebut Pat.

General Zod

 

Avedon gets it exactly right.

 from Sideshow:

Digby warns that the Stepford Press is going all-out to tell each other how important it is that Nancy Pelosi rein in the partisanship in Washington. Every time a pundit says something like this, a little bell should go off in your head that says, "I must ask this person immediately how Pelosi is supposed to stop the Republicans from being so viciously partisan."

It wouldn't hurt to start reminding people that "what is partisan" and "what is good for the country" are two different issues, and it is the latter that matters. If the Republicans oppose programs that are good for the country, the Democrats have no choice but to appear "partisan" - because this isn't about being a Democrat, it's about being an American.

She has it right. We CANNOT fall for the BS that disagreeing with The Chimp and his gang of thieves is somehow partisan and expecting us to do everything he wants is not. As I've said before, we need to grab these neocon pukes where the sun don't shine and kick them hard and long. Kick them until they think twice about taking this country to war for profit. To think long and hard before sending our young people to die in some hellhole so the vice president's friends could get a bigger golden parachute. And to think  forever before allowing a sociopathic loser to resolve his issues with his Daddy by playing toy soldiers with real lives.

Never Again.

Amen.

Garrison Keillor in Salon:

Here we have a slacker son of a powerful patrician father who resolves unconscious Oedipal issues through inappropriate acting-out in foreign countries. Hello? All the king's task forces can gather together the shards of the policy, number them, arrange them, but it never made sense when it was whole and so it makes even less sense now.

American boys in armored jackets and night scopes patrolling the streets of Baghdad are not going to pacify this country, any more than they will convert it to Methodism. They are there to die so that a man in the White House doesn't have to admit that he, George W. Bush, the decider, the one in the cowboy boots, made grievous mistakes. He approved a series of steps that he himself had not the experience or acumen or simple curiosity to question and which had been dumbed down for his benefit, and then he doggedly stuck by them until his approval ratings sank into the swamp.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise.

from Bloomberg:

Exxon Mobil's Biggest Oil Spill? Look in Brooklyn, Not Alaska

By Matthew Leising

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The biggest oil spill Exxon Mobil Corp. has to answer for isn't the cargo that gushed from the Exxon Valdez tanker into Alaska's Prince William Sound. It's the fuel soaked into the ground beneath a working class section of Brooklyn, New York.


The pressure is rising on Exxon Mobil to expand its cleanup of oil that seeped into the soil over many decades in the Greenpoint neighborhood. The New York State attorney general's office is threatening legal action, and two suits in the past year seek billions of dollars for alleged damage to property values and possible health risks. (more)

It's easy to post record profits when other people are paying the real price for the way you do business.

Scum.  Not even worthy to breathe the same air as the rest of us.


PTAAGH!


 

What he said......

from MSNBC via Crooks & Liars:


Keith Olbermann  spits in The Chimp's smirk ridden face, removes his pointy little head and hands it back to him. 

A bravura performance that speaks truth to power the way all of us, the media included,  should be doing all the time.

Watch it.

Pass it forward.

Draw strength from it, the time  for direct action may be coming soon .

My God, What Have We Done?

 from the New York Times:  

A listing, with photos, of the 3000 plus American service personel who have died so far in Iraq.

Do your duty. Call up the dead from your state. Memorize their faces. Salute them for their sacrifice. Do not forget them in the coming years.

From Pennsylvania:

144 lives, 141 men, 3 women. 

Ages 19 to 51. 

Mainly Army. Some Marines. A few Navy.

Mostly they come from small dead or dying ex-industrial burghs scattered all over the state. Strangely, none are from the rich suburbs of Philly or Pittsburgh.

Many of these brave and wonderful people were probably looking for the way out of poverty so gloriously promised by the lying ass recruiters. They didn't live long enough to find those promises turning to ash in their mouths.

And for what in the end? So that a psychopathic narcisistic loser could show the world that his dick was bigger than his Daddy's?

Sadly, there are not many websites large enough to post the pictures of the half a million Iraqis who have died as a result of our "Liberation. 

Not that anyone would make the effort to do so in any case.

It is to weep.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

 

Milestone, Millstone, You Decide.

Sometime this week (most likely Tuesday) visitor number 10,000 will click on to this humble blog. Whether by intent or confusion, whether a visit from our regular reader(sic) or simply some poor soul lost in the mighty blogosphere, we welcome you. Pull up a chair, spit on the rug and call the cat a bastard if you wish.

When I started this little island of egotism, I really expected nothing. And, with apologies to Dr. FrankNFurter, I have received it in abundance. With a new blog being born every second or so, many, many of them don't even get the minimal traffic we do here. It's just that at times it is hard to maintain regular activity in the face of such overwhelming indifference.

Carping aside, I'd like to thank some of the folks who make blogging worthwhile to me. Without my minimalist effort here I would never have become blog-interested enough to find:

• ae still striving to save the world from her post on arsepoetica
  
• fellow geographer/historian Eric illuminating the world on alterdestiny
• the magnificent Corndog himself of Corndogmatic fame,  lover of things odd and musical
• my journalistic hero  Diane and her always thoughtful Dee's Diversion
  
• magnificent grumbler doghouse riley at Bats Left Throws Right
• Chris Clarke and Zeke  following that Creek Running North forever
• Fred First sharing his wonderful life in Floyd, Va. on Fragments from Floyd
• Patrick and Teresa Making Light with the best commenting  team on the web
• Herr Professor Berube taking my head for a postmodern spin yet again
• My ArchPoet Dave leading the way on the Via Negativa
• John Scalzi saying Whatever he wants

A special shout out goes to my blogging compatriot, Kolchak, without whom precious little real writing would occur hereabouts. Many thanks for your support, Bill., and keep writing those columns

Afterall, I still know where the manuscript with a stake through its heart is buried.


Thank you all. It's been a great honor to be allowed  out of this dark musty corner of Blogistan to comment on your superb blogs,  fools that you folks may be to associate with this cursed anarchist, this sordid malcontent, this Wob.

Most of all, Thanks for All the Fish!


I beg to remain,

handdrummer

• 
  

I'm Dreaming of a Weird Christmas

from Kolchak

Every year, the holiday season brings with it its peculiar set of challenges. Finding that special present for your significant other. Paying for that special present for your significant other. Getting through the company Christmas party without drinking. And, --perhaps the most challenging of all-- avoiding holiday-themed shows on television.

In addition to the usual suspects, like variety shows and sitcoms, holiday themes can pop up in unusual places, like science fiction shows and other genre entries. Here are some of the weirdest Christmases I've found while channel surfacing:

The most notorious program in this category is probably The Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978. This was such a bizarre mixture of space opera and variety show that it only appeared on television once (How many Christmas specials can you say that about?) and Lucasfilm has never released it on home video. There are bootlegs in circulation-- Weird Al Yankovic "buys" one in the video for his song "White and Nerdy"--but I'm working primarily from my memory of that single broadcast.

The holiday in question here was Life Day, a celebration on Chewbacca's homeworld, Kashyyyk. Han Sola and Chewie are trying to make their way back to Kashyyyk, so the wookiee could celebrate Life Day with his family. Most of the stars of the original Star Wars movie appeared in the holiday special but the emphasis was on Chewie's family and characters played by performers like Bea Arthur and Art Carney. The Internet Movie Database says that Jefferson Starship also makes an appearance but I seem to have blocked that out of my memory.

If you're wondering how all this comes together, the answer is: badly, very badly. According to Mythmaking by John Baxter, the length of the show kept growing as the producers made room for the commercials that were being sold. Unfortunately, the story didn't grow. .Or the production values. As someone who still considers himself a Star Wars fan, I have to admit that the prospect of seeing more of Chewie's home planet was a big deal in 1978. But I wanted to wash my hands after seeing The Star Wars Holiday Special.

On the other hand, I usually find the time every year to dig out my copy of "Too Many Christmas Trees," an episode of The Avengers from 1965. In this story, a team of psychics tries to drive John Steed insane while he and Mrs. Peel are attending a multi-day Christmas party in the country. Although "Too Many Christmas Trees" features a classic "Avengers"-style British eccentric--a man fanatically dedicated to the works of Charles Dickens--this is a moderately serious episode with Mrs. Peel showing genuine concern over the possibility of Steed having a breakdown.

However, there are some lighter touches. Early in the story, Steed opens a Christmas card from his previous partner, Mrs. Cathy Gale. As he examines the envelope, Steed says, "Whatever could she be doing in Fort Knox?" At roughly that time, Honor Blackman, the actress who played Mrs. Gale, was starring in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.

BBC America is currently running The Avengers, but the network seems to be sticking to the color episodes while "Too Many Christmas Trees" was filmed in black-and-white.

And, of course, no holiday season would be complete without lizard-like extraterrestrials eating live rats and otherwise camping it up. In 1984, this obvious gap was being filled by V, a weekly version of a popular mini-series. Ultimately, the weekly V didn't last much longer than the mini-series but it lasted enough for the producers to take a crack at a Christmas episode.

As you may recall, V dealt with the fight between human race and the lizard-like Visitors for control of the Earth. In the weekly series, though, this fight consisted mostly of running and shooting, while, in the original dealt more with political maneuvering.

In the Christmas episode, the Visitor leader, who went by human name of Diana , celebrates the holidays by creating an evil clone of a human-Visitor hybrid (Don’t ask.).

Meanwhile, Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) , the toughest and coldest of our human characters, undergoes the Grinch heart-expansion treatment as he and the other resistance fighters smuggled some human children into the relative safety of Los Angeles.

Earlier in the season, Los Angeles had been established as an open city, where both humans and Visitors could live without restrictions. I’m mentioning that because I think that was the main reason why humans were celebrating Christmas. In a surprising bit of actual world-building, it’s mentioned that some of the traditional stores are running out of supplies and many of the holiday gifts are hand-made items being sold by street vendors.

The complete weekly run of V is currently available on DVD. The show had a long list of problems when it first appeared and those problem haven't gone away, But there are elements to the series that I still like.

A relatively recent SF Christmas program is "The Christmas Invasion," a special episode of the recently-revived Doctor Who. It's first run, in England, was in Dec., 2005. In this story, aliens called the Sycorax come to Earth during the holidays, in order to stop the Doctor from regenerating. This episode is more about David Tennant taking over the role of the Doctor than it is about Christmas, but there are exceptions. At one point, a group of Sycorax, all dressed as Father Christmas, pursue our heroes. Also, a very secret branch of the British government called Torchwood destroys the Sycorax ship on Dec. 25, and "the explosion at Christmas" is mentioned in a later episode.

The Scii-Fi Channel is has scheduled a rerun of "The Christmas Invasion" for 3 p.m. on Dec. 25.

This is not a complete list of weird Christmas episodes by any means. During the first season of Bomes , a mystery/crime show on Fox, the main characters spent the holidays in quarantine together. In Beauty and the Beast, the people who live in the streets beneath New York City have a ceremony that celebrates Winter Solstice.

When handdrummer and I first talked about this post, he remembered a holiday episode of Hill Street Blues, and said that Kwanzaa played a role in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. So, if you have any nominees for this list, let us know.

 

Happy Solstice!

 

Working Out the Bugs

from Kolchak:

I don’t know how long it’ll take. It could take years, but it could happen a lot faster. All I can say is that sooner or later--my bet’s on sooner-- I won’t be able to watch first- run television, whether it’s on broadcast or cable.

And I’m not complaining about the shows themselves--not yet, anyway. I’m complaining about how difficult it is to watch a show when the picture has been all but crowded off the screen by an infestation of network identification logos, animated ads for other shows and lines of text marching across the bottom of the screen.

At this point, you may be thinking: What a wuss. You can just tune that stuff out. Well, ,maybe you can. Me, I still hear the Muzak that they play at shopping malls.

I realize that network logos--sometimes called “bugs”-- serve an actual purpose. They’re the easiest way to identify specific networks, when you’re running the dial.

I particularly like how the operators of Logo, which specializes in gay interest programming, actually use their bug to make a visual pun. While most networks put their bugs in lower right hand corner of the screen, Logo’s on the upper right, which is consistent with a network with…um, how shall we say it?… different orientation.

Most of the time, though, we have to deal with more than just bugs. There are ads for other shows which usually include some sort of animation or miniaturized clip (a video bite, rather than a sound bite?) for the show. These ads can vary in size. The largest ones I’ve seen so far--on TNT, I think--can fill a quarter of the screen. When you’re watching a sitcom or a police procedural, that’s not a problem. When you’re trying to watch, say, The Fellowship Of the Ring, it becomes a different matter entirely. Can people actually follow what’s going on in these shrunken clips? Does the motion in these scenes do anything but distract the viewer from the show he or she is trying to watch? Granted, that may be a good thing in some cases, but, it’s still annoying.

Things get worse when you turn to CNN. On this channel, there’s a bug; the time and a ticker-style headline display at the bottom of the screen. Immediately above that, there’s a space used for captions relating to, or a quick summary, of the story currently being told. Sometimes, when CNN is using a broadcast from an affiliate station, its graphics partially obscure the ones that the station is using.

That’s not all, folks. CNN’s morning show recently added a video wall to its set.

On top of that wall is another news ticker, displaying headlines. So there are points when there are headlines at the bottom of the screen and at the top. And they’re not the same ones.

A relatively new cable service called Current has brought its own twist to the clutter problem. As you may know, Current broadcasts short non-fiction videos.(which they insist on calling pods.), many of which are contributed by viewers. I’m not sure whether it’s accurate to call these pieces documentaries, which is one of the problems I have with Current. But it’s also off-topic at the moment.

No video runs more than eight minutes, but, apparently, the Powers That Be at Current are afraid that may be too much for their target demographic.

This network has a two-part bug, and both parts are moving. The word “current” is built in the lower right-hand corner, while a loading bar, like the ones you find on some websites. You can’t tell exactly how much time is left in the video you’re watching, but you can tell whether you’ve passed the halfway mark

While all this is going on, a photo of the video’s creator flashes on and off, along with shots from coming distractions, er, attractions.

I don’t have any theory as to why this is happening, except to say that even I’ve noticed the similarity between these screens and the screens on most computer games. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that my proficiency with computer games is almost too small to measure. If I spend a lot of time with a game, I can usually work my way up from Hopeless to Mediocre, but that’s it.

Still, there’s a upside to all this. It’s a good rationalization for buying DVDs. Just don’t talk to me about Blu-Ray, okay?

 

Goodbye, You Old Zipper Neck!

Actor Peter Boyle Dead at 71

NEW YORK (AP) - Peter Boyle, the sardonic father on TV's "Everybody Loves Raymond," has died at New York Presbyterian Hospital, his publicist says.

The 71-year-old actor died last night after a long battle with multiple myeloma and heart disease.

 

Poem of the Day

FOR the 300 mourners, it was just too much to bear. As the poignant words of a ten-year-old girl remembering her dead father echoed around the church, tears flowed like rain. Athena, the daughter of Flight Lieutenant Gareth Nicholas, who died in Afghanistan, said goodbye in a beautiful poem, called simply My Dad. (more)



MY DAD

He was a great father
for every good reason
I wish he was still alive
He would still be with me
if it hadn’t gone wrong
I wish he had survived
I feel like it was all a dream

But it’s not what it seems
That he’s still with me in my heart
And in my sad sad dreams
I’m crying at this moment
But I can’t stop now
I wish he was still with me

And he’s whispering
in the clouds:
‘I will visit you in your dreams
And we shall roam free
Playing in the grassy fields
Definitely You and Me’


Athena Nicholas

The Most Significant SF Books of the Last 50 Years

I am not all that surprised by how many of these I've read, just as I'm not surprised by the ones I have not. Sword of Shanana is one of the worst books ever typed. Thomas Covenant is a leper of the soul as well as the body and as such was totally unreadible for me.

(ones in red not read)

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002


from SFBC

1. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
   
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A,. Heinlein
   
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
    
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. 1st Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Stephen Donaldson
    
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
    
27. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
    
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringword, Larry Niven
    
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
    
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer