Happy Halloween

TECH NOTES: The photo is from the Cassini mission. It is a new Saturn image released

If Ever He Would Leave Us …

Robert Goulet desperately needed a lung transplant.

It didn’t work out.

Christina’s Outing

NOTE: You can download Christina’s Craving complete.pdf [link works as of 15 Mar 2012]

I am woman, hear me roar.

I am Blakely St. James.

Halloween was always important to my feminine identity AS Blakely St. James, since Christina’s Hideaway was released on Halloween 1983, and Christina’s Craving ends on a fictional Halloween, with the eponymous heroine dancing with the author behind the authoress, Blakely St. James.

First Manassas

I am astonished on the eve of battle. These two great armies of the blogosphere are drawn up, face to face, General versus General: The Dread Pundit Bluto (if that IS his real name) versus Glenn Greenwald, Steve Benin versus Dr. Rusty Shackleford, Blue Crab Boulevard versus Newshoggers, Captain Ed versus Crooks & Liars, Balloon Juice versus Hot Air and Michelle Malkin versus Reality Itself.

And, as the two tribes face off across the waterhole, I think of what started all this: not one soldier with a rifle.

But, rather, one soldier with a pen.

Courage.

[NOTE: The entire first part of the blog battle over “The Baghdad Diarist” is chronicled HERE. A searchable .pdf with links.]

Col. Boylan Goes Off The Reservation

Regular readers might recognize this, from Sept. 3rd’s “Meet The New Baghdad Bob“:

I checked the infostream [internet] for actual quotes from Boylan and found only one prior citation swarm in 2007: An April quote about how Iraqi protests were not bad, but were, instead, a vindication of how mass demonstrations showed that democracy was working. Then nothing until August and the extraordinary step of the Chief Spokesman for the Iraq theater sending an email to a Right-Wing blogger [to Confederate Yankee 'confirming' Pvt. Beauchamp's "recant"ing and then, the letter to Kevin Drum:]

Political Animal
Kevin Drum
September 2, 2007

PETRAEUS AND THE REPUBLICAN CAUCUS….Yesterday I received an email from Col. Steven Boylan, the Public Affairs Officer for Gen. David Petraeus, highlighting some disagreements

Quayle’s Brain Updates – Friday & Saturday

(ANOTHER VIEW)

This story continues to swirl, perhaps in directions that the Rightie Blogosmear™ didn’t intend or expect. The original post, “A Convenient Leak for Dan Quayle’s Brain” is here — a longish little report that seems to have generated a lot of interest. It’s currently being featured on Salon‘s Blog Report, and The Moderate Voice‘s “Around the Sphere.”

Blacksmith of the Year Named in Toronto

This part of the story is fiction:

Dateline: Dearborn, Michigan
October 30, 1902
SMITHY HONOREES ANNOUNCED

The Greater Detroit Amagamated Blacksmiths’ Guild honored one of its own last night, as the “Blacksmith of the Year” awards were held at McGinty’s Wagon Shop of 688-692 Mack Avenue, in honor of Will McGinty’s retirement.

A Convenient Leak for Dan Quayle’s Brain

These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years.

- Franz Kafka, The Trial.

I do not know what Franklin Foer did to piss off the White House or the Army, or both, but the Drudge Report posted this “scoop” today, and the Rightie Blogosmear™ went b*g-f**k b*t-sh*t beerjolais karazee. (Really? Is THIS the most important story in America? Really?)

Tortured Logick

On the way out the door, I saw this, and, after rolling on the floor in gales of laughter at the sheer hypocrisy of it, I had to “share” it with you.

Mitt Wrongmney on health care (from the New York Times transcript of last night’s GOP debate):

To The Sea

I am off to the sea. Will be back in a few days.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

 

Sir Isaac Newton

Courage.

GOP v. Truth

We begin with the Weasel-in-Waiting, Mitt (“Unclean Hands”) Romney.

It seems that Romney continues his decidedly un-Christian “I will do ANYTHING to win” streak. The one that first surfaced in my awareness when he retroactively gamed the System to bald-facedly claim (as only lawyers can manage) that he’d ACTUALLY been living in Massachusetts during the period when he was living in Utah, paying taxes in Utah, driving with Utah plates, Utah drivers’ license, etc.