Category: Everything Else

Sad news this morning.

We all should be so lucky to have had a life and a death like Julia Child’s. Dying peacefully in your sleep at age 91 is a pretty good way to go.

Julia Child’s passing is a great loss. Her honesty and humor were refreshing, and her passion for good food, good wine, and having fun in the kitchen were obvious.

I saw a couple of the FoodTV programs featuring her last year. One that stuck in my mind was a visit by Emeril to her home, where they cooked together. She totally schooled Emeril on how to cook a chicken. It was a hoot. There was another epiode where Wolfgang Puck came over bearing champagne and made her veal, asparagus, and dessert.

Red wine with your steak, anyone?

I’ve often thought over the past few years that my grandparents, who weathered the Great Depression, would have a lot of insight to offer on today’s economy. Kevin Drum makes a similar point on his site today:

Almost everyone who’s not already well off these days knows someone who’s been ruined by a personal catastrophe, and this personal knowledge rubs off. You’re worried that you could get laid off at any time

There is so much bad news coming out of Iraq these days, so much confusion and chaos, and no idea how anything good is going to be able to come out of that mess, that I just shut down and stop processing information. I don’t want to deal with it.

I suspect I’m not the only person who feels that way, and that might be part of why Iraq coverage is not in the press as much anymore. Also, of course, the so-called handover of power now means that news stations can, if they choose, slot Iraq back into their Middle East coverage, not treat it as US news (despite the fact that American troops are still dying and being wounded there daily).

All this is a very long preface to yet another reason why I LOVE Fafblog. The guy is a freaking genius. He somehow manages to report on a lot of news and still make me smile.

“You gotta use discipline on a young country,” says Giblets. “Otherwise it won’t grow up with the right values. Spare the gonad electrocution, spoil the child.”
“But won’t torture corrupt the government an make the people angrier and more hostile?” says me. “An won’t they hate us more for letting the new government torture them?”
“Oh-hoho,” says the Medium Lobster. “You poor, ignorant little Fafnir. You must understand: Iraq is going through a transitional period right now. It would be wrong for us to shock them with the presence of strange, new, unfamiliar cultural elements, such as ‘not-torture’ and ‘not-oppression.’ The key phrase here, Fafnir, is ‘transition’.”

Meanwhile Iraq’s new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has banned the TV network Al Jazeera for the next 30 days after accusin it of “inciting hatred” an actin “against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people.”

“But how is this different from politically-motivated censorship?” says me.
“Well you can’t have a democracy without some politically-motivated censorship,” says Giblets.

Go read the rest. Then bookmark Fafblog if you haven’t already. And then bow! yes, bow before Giblets, bow before Giblets NOOOOOOOOW!

Sent to me by my sister. I have no idea who wrote it originally.

A Guide to U.S. Newspapers

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like the smog statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn’t have to leave L.A. to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country, and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority, feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.

10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

My addendum:

11. New York Newsday is read by the people who used to read the New York Daily News but have moved to Long Island. They still don’t care who runs the country as long as they get a seat on the train, but now their commute is twice as long.

Three months to election day. And a fresh round of terror warnings. What concerns me is not so much the warning but

1) The sense that there have been too many vague terror alerts without anything happening – and by that I mean the arrest and successful prosecution of some actual terrorists here in the US.

2) A sense that there is so much skepticism of anything that comes out of this administration’s mouth that warnings are not going to get taken seriously, even if the threat is real.

Now I’m still willing to believe that our law enforcement agencies are sincerely trying to find and stop terrorists. But it would help me and I think a lot of other citizens be less cynical about the whole thing if we saw or heard more than just vague threat announcements ever so often. I’m not an expert on how terrorists get busted, but it seems to me that if our law enforcement services know enough about domestic plots to be able to provide warnings about specific times and places, they should know enough about who is doing the planning to make some arrests and make some cases in court (hint – Jose Padilla doesn’t count). It also doesn’t help credibility when the government can’t even produce an accurate report on how many terror attacks have occurred recently.

At least on the left side of the fence I don’t have a lot of company in my willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. It’s not just the flame-throwers like Pandagon who think the government is either deliberately politicizing, flat-out lying and/or too incompetent to do a good job of protecting the country from real threats. Even more moderate lefties like Orcinus are highly skeptical of what’s going on.

Trent Lott calling John Kerry