BunkBlog

What a difference a build makes. The 0.9.3 build of Firefox was a little weird for me, causing me to reload pages from dynamic scripts at times. The 1.0RC is faboo, though. I’m trying to decide if I should kill NewzCrawler for the built-in RSS feeds in the bookmarks page. I’m thinking not. The newspaper format I can generate from NewzCrawler is just much cooler than the headline-only feeds in the Bookmarks list. Still, it’s interesting to see a new way of deploying RSS feeds to users.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a cool movie. Alex is running around the den screaming random Sky Captain-related phrases now, driving his mother insane.

Gorgeous movie, really. The first 30 or 40 minutes were fantastic, and then it slowed down a bit. Still maintained a great noir-like look and feel, but Paltrow was doing way too much of the intrepid female reporter crap. I know the movies it is aping were kind of melodramatic, so I’ll let it go a bit. The performance of the late Laurence Olivier was pretty cool, but not as realistic as I thought it would be. The trailers made it seem that Angelina Jolie was the lead, but she doesn’t even show up until at least an hour into the film.

Anyway, fun movie. No particular depth, and some of the surprises are telegraphed 5 to 30 minutes before the punch lines, but fun matinee. Go see it. Take your hyperactive little boys. They’ll love it.

Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon

bq. Harrington said she’ll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.

Guess she learned her lesson. Just think, you could have been mauled by a 50-something schoolteacher and her bookmark!

Some soldiers at Third Brigade Combat Team have been told that they need to reenlist for present duty assignment or go to Iraq which means they’ll get stoplossed and their enlistments will be extended indefinitely anyway. Althought they aren’t literally being told this, it is implied.

bq. “There’s probably a lot of places on post where they could put those folks (who don’t re-enlist) until their time expires. But I don’t want to rule out the possibility that they could go to a unit that might deploy,” said Healy.

So, they just might get sent to Iraq, there’s just no way to be sure. But, hey, we’ve got an offer you can’t refuse. Reenlist for Third Brigade and you won’t have to go to Iraq (so far as we have planned right now). Then, when the global war on terror is over (surely in less than three years, right?), you’ll be free to get out with no more Stop Loss looming.

One of my coworkers this morning attempted to declare a jelly donut as a near-complete food. There’s jelly, which (theoretically) means fruit. The donut itself has eggs, milk, and grains. Sounded good to me, so I ate three.

OK, not really. The banana muffins someone brought in were good, though.

Anyone want to give me a massage? Didn’t sleep well last night, for some reason, and now my shoulders are tight. Sitting at a computer all day won’t help, I’m betting.

Ah, well… off to work.

Citing Effort to Fight Terror, Vladimir Putin has put forth a plan to return to the days of Soviets choosing the political leaders of each country, and each Soviet answerable only to the President rather than to the citizenry.

Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or presidents of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local parliaments — and only on the president’s recommendation.

Sounds an awful lot like a return to pre-1992 to me…

Kerry says failure to deal with regime led to nuclear threats…as if Clinton dealt with the DPRK any better? Or Bush 41 or Reagan? For whatever combinations of reasons, we haven’t had a consistent policy dealing with North Korea in the past 20 years; I wonder what Kerry supposed we should do about them.

This analysis of CBS’s documents seems pretty thorough and convincing. The superscript and completely different signatures are interesting. Not to mention, the document used as a “proof” of forgery was done with Word’s default settings: 1.5 inch margins. Normal margins are 1 inch per side; even assuming the document was created on the old mil-standard paper, that leaves a half-inch anomaly for any clerk worth his salt in 1973. Wonder if the people who created these apparent forgeries are working for the Left or the Right. If the Left, they should not be trusted with anything ever again; if the Right, congratulations and well-played.

Now, if someone would please get the political discourse back to something that resembles current issues, please? Like I give a rat’s azz about what either of these two twits did in 1968 or 1973. Geez.

Reuters reports on the latest Congressional Budget Office findings, which show a 200 billion dollar increase in the projected long-term deficit compared to reports just six months ago. I’m sure this will be attacked and trumpeted by the two candidates in the next couple weeks.

Bush blames the 2001 recession, the costs of the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror for the growing budget shortfall.

Yeah, I’m sure the tax cut didn’t do anything at all to reduce our total budgetary inputs. Do you suppose the politicians who run our country can even balance their checkbooks?

If you saw the RNC at all, you know the podium had a less-than-subtle cross on it. Some people objected.

Karl Rove told CNN he did not think the podium’s decorative woodwork looked like a cross.
“My God, where do they come up with this stuff?” he said. “Does it look to you like it’s a cross? I don’t think so.”

Yeah, right.

Kerry now claims that Bush is Unfit to Lead, a sharp change to his earlier approach. I still wonder at the ability to focus on the Vietnam War as the most important issue of this election.

Why has Kerry not explained why he was so credulous as to quote discredited reports about military abuses 30 years ago? Why has he not brought up any details of his 20 years in the Senate? And are all of his speeches filled with vague promises, or just every one I’ve seen or heard a piece of?

On the other side of the political fence today, was the Republican Convention just a chance to bash the Dems or what? It’s an interesting contrast – the DNC stressed Democratic party people and issues; the RNC stressed Democratic party people and Republican issues. Very vitriolic this week. Looking like an ugly election.

Driving down a four-lane one-way street this morning, I had the interesting experience of watching someone turn left from the second lane right in front of a motorcycle officer of the local PD. The officer, sensing an easy ticket, did . . . nothing at all and drove away.

This is such a typical move by the police here. The only laws they enforce seem to involve speeding in school zones. Park on the wrong side of the street? No problem. Park on a corner, rather than the required 15 feet away? Still good. Run every stop sign in town? Hey, you’re from Texas. Never use your turn signal? That’s okey dokey. Go 22 miles per hour in a school zone, with no children within a mile? Busted!

Is it any wonder we have more accidents in this small city than in the much larger Midland-Odessa area? Our drivers suck and the police let them.

This morning, I heard a minor celebrity on the radio say something that was actually entertaining: George W. Bush is the only President I can think of that I’m sure I could beat at Trivial Pursuit.

Hehe

I love Tom Tomorrow. Check out This Modern World for an entertaining glimpse at the logic of the Dubya.

About 3/4 of the way down this page, the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, makes an ass of himself on national television.

On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who’s funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from,” Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: “Excuse me?” The Speaker went on: “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years – George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there.” Wallace: “You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?” Hastert: “I’m saying I don’t know where groups – could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

We just don’t know. That’s the Karl Rove approach to smearing people – make it ambiguous. Maybe Ann Richards is gay; we just don’t know. Maybe John Kerry shot himself to get a purple heart; we just don’t know. Maybe George W. Bush screwed a goat on his ranch last week; we just don’t know.

There are a lot of things we don’t know. Speculating wildly about things with absolutely zero evidence is not the way we should expect our elected leaders to behave. But maybe we just don’t know.

I know I said I’d have tile photos up “as soon as” the family returned from Holland, and it’s been weeks since then. Better late than never, here are some pictures of the new tile, in bathroom and kitchen. Unfortunately for contrast, we don’t have any good pictures of the yellow kitchen before we started working on it. It was hideous, though.

I can’t wait to see how the Dems spin this to make it sound like Bush is not doing anything to stop the attack ads.

It’s pretty well documented that Karl Rove is a devious attack dog, so I don’t doubt that there was some backroom encouragement of the Swift Boat Veterans for Political Gain, but now that the President has promised McCain that he’ll sue to stop the 527 ads, it should be interesting to see how the Kerry campaign (and its supporters) react.

I’m sure the fact that the liberal 527s have outspent the conservative 527s by at least an order of magnitude has nothing to do with Bush’s condemnation of them. And the fact that the lie-filled first SBVFTT ad has received national attention that has caused the race to swing a little back toward the Republicans is just a happy coincidence.

This Mackubin Thomas Owens article says things very clearly and cogently that the Swift Boat Veterans for Political Gain have missed. If Kerry is proud of his military service, why was he ashamed of it in 1971? If he thinks of his fellow veterans as a band of brothers, why did he call them war criminals in 1971? Was he cravenly attempting to curry favor with the Democratic party and the anti-war groups then, or is he trying to curry favor now? Which position is his true core belief?

Read the article – it’s good.

We had a good weekend, following the Texas Wine Trail. Wow, did we try a lot of wines. Of course, we’ve now outgrown the wine rack. And, what are we gonna do with 20 wine-and-cheese party trays?

Next, we must plan a pretentious wine and cheese party, obviously. Gotta have an excuse to break open the Raisin wine. Or Holiday Rouge…

Oh, and the B&B in Fredericksburg was amazing. We spent many hours relaxing in the hot tub, even while it was raining. We biked around F-burg and its environs (over an hour this morning – ow), and we ate good food. Fantastic romantic weekend.