the blog quebecois

I ran across this piece by Peggy Noonan the other day and meant to link to it, but other stuff came up and I forgot about it. Today I was reading Kathy Shaidle's blog. She'd seen the column too, and the same paragraph had caught her eye:

But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.

I'm not exactly sure what she means by that, except maybe that Frank Rich is a meathead.

Whatever. It made me laugh out loud. The lady can certainly turn a phrase.

An animated optical pattern that induces visual distortions familiar to LSD users. Not that I would know anything about that.

And no, it isn't what's known as a "flash screamer," i.e., something that bids you to pay close attention to the screen and then suddenly switches to a snarling demon.

Maybe it was funny the first time someone did it, but it's now just irritating and juvenile. Also, I got stung by another one yesterday.

But even if it's irritating and juvenile, it's still funny to watch other people get hit. Warning: Music in first link; banners maybe NSFW in second; sounds.

Back some years ago, the local library system was taking its first steps to integrate with the Internet. It also installed something called Elvis, which was the acronym for an automated reminder service. Basically, Elvis would phone you up to remind you that your books were due, or that something you had put a hold on was now available, etc.

But then something in Elvis broke (I think it was his troubled marriage to the photocopier) and he started spraying out random calls to people who weren't even on his list. You'd pick up the phone and this creepy mechanized voice would pronounce (for example) Oct. O. Ber. Six. Teen. and then hang up.

Naturally, most people concluded that it was the Grim Reaper, announcing the date for their rendezvous with oblivion. I mean, what else could it be?

We can't hope to reproduce that level of panic among the populace; we can only do our part.

I originally didn't want to use this link -- it was flaky, and it disappeared altogether over the weekend. It's back now, though, and seems steadier.

Basically, it's a script that someone's written that allows you to enter some text and have a machine read it to any phone number (only in the US or Canada).

This is what you fill in:

Number To Call: xxx-xxx-xxxx A ten-digit (with area code) number.
Number on Caller ID: xxx-xxx-xxxx Same deal. You can use a real number or just make one up.
Name on Caller ID: Whatever you like.
Voice: A drop-down list with 11 different male and female voices.
Text To Say: Whatever you like, but no obscenities or threats, please. (The program records IP numbers and repeats them at the end of the message. It blocks messages sent from behind proxy servers.) You're also limited to 25-30 words.

You can put in your own phone number to be on hand when the fun begins. The program queues the calls for five or ten seconds, which will allow you time to get back and pretend to be studying your fingernails when the phone rings.

My mother, sister and 7-year-old niece were over when I gave it a try. I sent a message something like: "Claire [my niece] gets to stay up all night long and watch as much TV as she wants and eat all the candy she likes."

My mother answered the phone and you really should have been there to appreciate the look on her face.

Needless to say, Claire was thrilled by this unsolicited advice. My mother and sister were more suspicious, wondering if it was a wrong number. But as my sister pointed out: How would they know her name?

Sensing that this was spiralling out of control, I confessed to my role in the matter. Or I would have, if I'd been able to catch my breath, because I was doubled up in convulsions by then. I have a theory that laughter, like intestinal gas, must be released immediately, lest it damage major organs.

Link to the program here. (If it goes down again, you can get it here, from Google's cache.) Or you can go directly to the page that it feeds and which actually places the call. (The instructions are a bit more complicated, but you can operate from there.)

If you're at a loss what to say, here's a message thread on Fazed (from where I got the original link) that'll give you some ideas.

A couple of the commenters on Fazed were convinced that this was some sort of scam to get phone numbers for telemarketers. I rather doubt it. There are easier ways to harvest large amounts of valid numbers. Though there is some connection to telemarketing -- the calls come from demos of software intended for that purpose.

Site Meter recently introduced an "Out Click" reading, to show which outgoing links my devoted readers are clicking on. Either this new feature isn't working very well or my devoted readers are so devoted that they can't bear to leave this fine blog for even a second.

I'm guessing that it was the first of those, so I've installed My BlogLog, which will provide a more accurate accounting of the links you aren't clicking. You'll notice the small tooltips balloon that lights up when you hover over a link.

Oh, and a happy 4th to our American cousins. I'd put up a bunch of links to commemorate the day, but you probably wouldn't click on them anyway.

They're not kidding. I wasn't able to make it past the seventh level -- the top score is an unbelievable 773.

You get 20 seconds to knock down an arrangement of dominoes, squashing a tomato (I think) in the bargain. If you clear all the dominoes, you get a time bonus. For each one still standing, you lose a second on your next attempt. You can elect to pass on any of three stages.

To restart the game, click on "Quit" in the upper right of the Game Over or high score screen. Warning: Music and sounds.

i’ll remember frank lloyd wright
all of the nights we’d harmonize till dawn
i never laughed so long

simon & garfunkel

A 3-D architectural design studio featuring tips from Frank Lloyd Wright. This is kind of amazing, because the last I heard, he was still dead.

I hope you like the house I designed with the help of Frank. I call it Casa del Go Away, I've Got A Gun.

I've noticed that some fashion designers really don't seem to like women very much.

Then again, they exhibit real hostility towards men, too.

If you thought of the Democratic Underground as a bunch of inbred idiots yakking up ever-more-absurd conspiracy theories about how it was George Bush and the Mossad who plotted to destroy the World Trade Center, you would be wrong.

They also do experiments.

Those Germans! Always with the jokes:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Police in Berlin said on Wednesday they had arrested two men on suspicion of placing cement-filled soccer balls around the city and inviting people to kick them. At least two people injured themselves by kicking the balls, which were chained to lampposts and trees alongside the spray-painted message: "Can you kick it?"

Police said they had identified a 26-year-old and a 29-year-old and had found a workshop in their apartment where they made the balls. The two are accused of causing serious physical injury, dangerous obstruction of traffic and causing injury through negligence, police said.

Here's a tastier idea:

The Play & Freeze is shaped like a football with a metal cylinder inside. The cylinder is where you add your ingredients. We were making vanilla ice-cream so our ingredients, which we prepared earlier as they say, were sugar, cream, eggs and vanilla pods. Ingredients to make 0.5 litre of vanilla ice-cream cost us around £2.00. With the cylinder in place inside the football, the rest of the space is packed with as much ice as you can fit in, plus salt. Rock salt is recommended but we used table salt and it worked fine. Rock salt should enhance the freezing ability.

Roll it around (kicking or heading it would be a bad idea, as it weighs about six pounds fully loaded) for 20 minutes or so, and presto: perfectly barbequed chicken.

Oh, the World Cup? My heart says France (it would be nice to see Zidane go out on top retire without actually killing someone) but my head says Italy. However, since my mouth hasn't said anything, you'll have difficulty proving it in court.

Douglas Kmiec looks at the US Supreme Court's problematic Hamdan decision:

Ironically, to apply Geneva to al Qaeda in Hamdan the Court had to conclude that the present war is "not of an international character." To indulge the Court's conclusion requires more patience and suspension of belief than anyone should be asked to muster. Even if one was inclined to construe these rather clear words as referring to a conflict between a nation and a group of non-national radical Islamists rather than a conflict taking place in solely one nation (the President's wholly reasonable interpretation), the President's view, as a foreign affairs precedent, the separation of powers, and common sense, deserved to be credited.

As does the nimble-witted Mark Steyn:

The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the US Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a right to jihad -- or, if you're a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus, a woman's right to Jews.

I've yet to catch the Sudoku (if you're not sure what it is, there's an explanation here) bug, though its devotees seem to find it fascinating. For them, then: Sudoku Combat, a site where you can play by yourself or against other people in puzzles rated from "Easy" to "Evil." The site calculates your win/loss ratio and generates rankings.

There's no money on the line, which is probably a good thing, because I think that Sudoku would be a prime target for computer bots using brute-force attacks.

Not this year, Norman Mailer. I don't think so, Margaret Drabble. Fugeddabout it, Gore Vidal.

I've yet again scooped the blogosphere by finding out the identity of this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. OK, I don't know her name, unless it really is "The Woman I Was," but I recognize Nobel Laureate material when I see it:

Bloody Bush is celebrating his 60th birthday.. he invited his tails “followers” to celebrate with him.. How many children and women will die all over the world to make him happy and make a wish?
Bush, the terrorist, we wish if your mum did not born you. You are the bloodies liar not only on the earth but through the history.. I do not know how your silly wife and stupid daughters are proud of you? The answer is they silly and stupid!! But what about the tails who are celebrating with him? How do they agree with him on killing more than 100 Iraqi civilians every day? The whole world should know that the ongoing blood baths in Iraq pushing toward a civil war made by the Americans. Stop staying silence, say with me to Bush:

MAY YOUR WISHES DO NOT COME TRUE ANY MORE.
Saying is not enough, let us work; let us have an action; not only to stop bloody Bush, the terrorist, wishes, but to save Iraq and the world from the White (Dark) House..

I, for one, am in awe.

Flawless politics? Check!

Victim of colonialism? Check!

An authentic style? Check! (It will be described as "experimentially primitive" in the citation.)

You scoff? Need I remind you of the illustrious Harold Pinter and this shooting star from the year before?

The lady is a lock.

Wikipedia:

The North Yungas Road (also Grove's Road, Coroico Road, Camino de las Yungas, "El Camino de la Muerte", "Death Road") is a 38 to 43 mile road (depending on source) leading from La Paz to Coroico, 35 miles (56 km) northeast of La Paz in the Yungas region of Bolivia. It is legendary for its extreme danger, one estimate is that nearly 100 travellers annually have died along the road -- the road moreover includes Christian crosses marking many of the spots where such vehicles have fallen. The road descends from approx. 12,000 ft (3600 m) to 1000 ft (330 m), transitioning quickly from cool altiplano terrain to rain forest as it winds through very steep hillsides and atop cliffs.

Only 38 to 43 miles, you say? No thanks! I'll crawl!

More pictures here.

I've seen a number of articles on the strategy of Pac-Man, but never one as detailed as this:

- Learn to do "head fakes", quick jerks of the joystick which fake the ghosts into changing direction or anticipating your movement incorrectly.

- Read the ghosts eyes: The ghosts eyes give away which direction they are going to turn next, they always look which way they'll go slightly before turning.

- You are faster on a clear road: If on the run, chose paths which have been cleared already to gain more speed advantage over your pursuers.

- The Escape Routes: The two exits above the ghost house and above the Pac-Man start position can only be travelled downwards by the ghosts, never upwards unless they are blue and on the run. Good to know this when you are being chased! (Thanks to Simon for this tip :))

- The hiding place: There is one safe spot in the maze. Reach it when none of the ghosts are looking at you and you can stay there safely for as long as you like. The ghosts will not find you.

Learn these lessons well, gwashoppah, and you, too, will someday be rewarded with the scene at the left, showing Pac-Man when the program breaks, at the 255th level. Assuming you've got five or six free hours to devote to the attempt.

You are no doubt champing at the bit to try out these new tactics. These online versions (Warning: sfx in both), one in Flash and the other in Java, seem to be pretty accurate renditions (though I haven't played the game for some time now, so I might be mistaken).

To get a perfect copy of the original, you'll have to install an emulator, of which the best known is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). This duplicates as closely as possible thousands of arcade (and console -- Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc.) games.

However, MAME, because of copyright reasons, doesn't distribute the ROM image files that are necessary to play the games.

Being a law-abiding citizen, you of course wouldn't think of doing a search for "ROM images" or "ROM sets." Nor would you dream of clicking on a link such as this, which might contain Pac-Man (and Ms. Pac-Man) ROMs.

He hydroplanes!

He separates!

He decapitates!

He disintegrates!

He levitates!

He inebriates! Hey, this one actually looks useful.

Warning: All links are to embedded video with sounds and whatnot.

Reuters:

Women going on boozy nights out have been warned by police to "wear nice pants" in case they fall down drunk in the street.

A Suffolk police safety campaign magazine shows pictures of young women slumped on the ground next to messages urging them: "If you've got it, don't flaunt it."

"If you fall over or pass out, remember your skirt or dress may ride up," the magazine says. "You could show off more than you intended -- for all our sakes, please make sure you're wearing nice pants and that you've recently had a wax."

Ah, yes. When you're lying unconscious in a puddle of vomit in the alley, nothing says "unladylike" more than untrimmed shrubbery. You might attract men this way, but probably not the type you want to take home to the drunk tank to meet Mother.

And you'll have to get there by yourself. The cops have better things to do.

A funny site that collects stories about, among other things, serving celebrities. (Link leads to one page. To see others, click on "Gossip" at the top.) Some of them are jerks:

I started my bartending shift in the lounge at 10p and inherited three guys who had been there quite a while. They were kind of loud and getting tanked. One of the waiters told me that it was Al Fraken and some buddies (he looked familiar, but I couldn't place him). Anyway a couple walks by them and Franken makes a comment about the woman's ass. She throws a glass of wine in his face. Franken says something else about her ass how many people have sampled it. This time the boyfriend (or husband) grabs Franken by the neck and punches him solidly in the face. Franken falls into the arms of his buddies totally dazed. They quickly paid their tab and took off - very minimal tip, by the way. I got the lady another glass of wine...

Some are nice:

About 2 years ago I was up from Seattle bartending at a very classy upper end Italian Restaurant in downtown Vancouver. Bill Gates and his wife brought about 15 people in for dinner. I think they were celebrating the future wedding of one of their guests (from what I heard). After about 3 hours of service, 8 bottles of wine, and 6 bottles of $1300.00 a pop champagne he racked up alittle over a $12000.00 bill. It was crazy, but he can afford it!! He left an $8000.00 tip. IT WAS INSANE...after dividing it up between all of us (roughly $890.00 a piece), I could have skipped out of work for 2 weeks. By far the BEST tipper and overall nicest couple ever. THANKS AGAIN BILL, YOU ROCK!!!!!!!!!

None of the stories are vetted, and some accounts describe a particular celebrity in completely contradictory ways. The possibility of exaggeration or lying exists; or maybe just an encounter with someone having a very bad day. So read, if you must, with the proverbial grain of salt.

If you have no salt, I'm sure the Bitter Waitress will be pleased to bring you some. Don't forget to tip.

Warning: Some of the language may be offensive.

we make money not art:

As part of his ongoing exploration of Religious Technological Artifacts, New York-based Canadian artist Paul Davies has built the Prayer Antenna, a porcupine-like helmet that allow its wearer to receive signals from God.

The thrift-store motor-cycle helmet is covered with antennae quills, and fitted with sufficient surveillance technology to receive signals from the gods. The helmet is mounted to the wall on an ornate arm and a small kneeling stool is provided. To use the Antenna the worshipper must kneel on the stool and inset their head into the helmet. The visor is blacked out. Integrated headphones allow the supplicant to experience the signals. Sufficient controls allow him/her to tune the signals.

Paul Davies explained me that "the helmet works very simply. There are two radio transmitters out in the museum/gallery/whatever and they transmist the amibiant sounds (people talking, etc) to the left and right channel of radio recievers hooked up to headphones inside the helmet (so each ear is a distinct source). The interactivity is the simple act of kneeling and putting your head into the helmet. What you hear is other people (what is god if not other people.)"

I don't see it that way, though maybe it's just the crowd I hang with.

As Celia Green points out, it's a rather dubious theological proposition:

The philosophers have discarded metaphysics and have a tinkling song of their own which says, "In the beginning was the word and the word is mine and the word was made by me." This is rather a strong position in its way, because if you try to criticize it they will point out that you can only do so in words, and they have already annexed all the words there are on behalf of humanity. (And the meaning of the words is the meaning humanity gave them, and they shall have no meaning beside it.)

The theologians are finding theology rather an embarrassment, and one can only suspect they would be happier without it. Their tradition does make it a little more difficult for them to put God in his proper place, but all things considered, they're keeping up with the times pretty well. Sartre said "Hell is other people"; the up-to-date theologian says "God is other people".

No worries, mate. If this God thing doesn't work out, you can always get a job as a street busker:

Mike Wood is the Comedy Engineer. He was born too late for vaudeville and too early for what will be its intergalactic counterpart. Still he manages to flout all the rules of the universe known to man. Relying heavily on his engineering degree, Mike will defy the laws of physics with nothing more than his tight pants. He’ll test quantum theory by impaling a catapulted cabbage on a spike atop his head.

I don't know if he's praying for cabbages, but they've got to be coming from somewhere.

Wolfmother is an Australian power trio that's just now getting some traction in this part of the world. This song, "Woman," dates back to last year.

It's an interesting video. From what I understand, they printed out every frame of a performance, and then re-filmed them in sequence, like an animation, adding effects.

The music? Tight and energetic rock. The singer/guitarist, Andrew Stockdale, sounds uncannily like a young Robert Plant. He also looks and dresses uncannily like Ronald McDonald. Unless there's some intended irony at play, he might want to get the image consultants working on that.

Joshua Treviño, who also blogs as Tacitus, put up a piece on his personal blog last week about squiring actress Ashley Judd around South Africa on some humanitarian mission. Very funny, but his previous employer saw it and started making grumbly noises about something or other with the implied threat of a lawsuit, so Joshua took the post down.

I had clipped this part of it, intending to link to the piece:

Now, let me remind the reader that we were in bloody Africa. There are many lovely things about Africa, and especially about South Africa. Still, continent-wide, the standard for a good day there is pretty set:

# Do I own nothing?
# Is my flesh rotting?
# Do I have to sleep near or on feces?

If you can answer no to all three questions, you have had a good day in Africa!

I feel somewhat qualified to comment on this, having spent two years in Bamako, Mali in West Africa (my father, an accountant at CN Rail, was lent out to CIDA for one of their foreign-aid projects). Apart from the bugs, I loved it; but let me tell you, there's a lot of truth in those questions.

Update: Will the wonders of the Internets never cease? Someone copied Joshua's post and put it up on Free Republic. Read all about his encounter with the vacuous Ms. Judd here.

(It might just be my browser, but the piece, at least as it appears on FR, is lousy with this -- Ó -- character replacing quotation marks.)

A very clever remake of Space Invaders using people as pixels.

Warning: Your standard video game beeps and boops, but you'll want the full game experience, yes?

There's a page (in French) with some details about the project here.

The phrase "worst MySpace page" would seem to be redundant; nevertheless, zefrank launched a contest to find it.

Most of the entries seem to have been put up expressly for the contest. They've now reverted to standard MySpace format (which is no thing of beauty itself) or allude to the joke by including zefrank's tricolor duck motif in the design.

Still, there seem to be a few that are for real, like this eye-poppingly (Warning: May induce epileptic fit, even if you're not epileptic.) bad design. That is, I think it's real, but it's impossible to read, so who knows?

If you haven't experienced the exquisite banality of MySpace yet, zefrank's "winners" page would be the place to start. Warning: Many of the links have embedded music.

I knew that Adolf Hitler had ambitions of being an artist, and supported himself as a student by selling small sketches. I was under the impression that they were mainly landscapes and architectural scenes, but it turns out he had an eye for the female form. Er, sort of. Click here for the full (Warning: NSFW) version.

As an artist, you'd have to say he made a great fascist dictator.

There are more of his pieces here. (The site is called hitler.org. There's some mildly-controversial material but no links to any neo-Nazi sites as far as I can tell. The very name, though, might trigger blocking or filtering software if it's installed on your computer.)

Via Cynical-C Blog

. . . what's become of Cindy Sheehan:

SHE bounds along on all fours through long grass, panting with her tongue hanging out. When she reaches the tap she paws at the ground, drinks noisily with her jaws wide open and lets the water cascade over her head.

Up to this point, you think the young woman could be acting — but the moment she shakes her head and neck free of droplets, exactly like a dog when it emerges from a swim, you get a creepy sense that this is something beyond imitation. Then she barks.

Via Nealenews

This commercial for American Express, featuring Andy Roddick, is from a while ago judging by the comments on the YouTube forum. However, it's just appeared on Canadian TV, in support of the Rogers Cup next month in Toronto. Pretty imaginative, if I do say:

Or you can play it as a game (press the keyboard "3" key for the 3D version).

Or you might remember this from a few days ago. The same guy gave Pong the pixilation treatment. (Yes, yes, he should have had the "paddles" on the sides, moving up and down, with the "ball" travelling horizontally. But he didn't. Flip your monitor on its side if you're such a purist.)

THE SONG: Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"
THE LYRIC: "He could throw that speed ball by you / make you look like a fool"
THE VERDICT: Bruce, we hate to bring this up, because we think you're great and everything, and it might sound a little nitpicky and all, but it's just that . . . um . . . well, a fastball is what Roger Clemens throws. A speedball is what John Belushi took to kill himself. Unless you were trying to make a prophetic comment about Doc Gooden's career, in which case you did a great job.

I've never been a fan of rock lyrics. Even at their most sublime, they rarely qualify as stand-alone poetry. But as Muddy Waters told Mick Jagger (I paraphrase, unable to find the quote), the lyrics and vocals are just another instrument in the mix; albeit probably the most important one. Most rock is repetitive and monotonous without it. It doesn't matter so much what someone is singing, as long as someone is singing.

Having said that, some lyrics deserve to be singled out for their consummate stupidity. A Hall of Lame, if you will. Warning: Language.

An interesting piece on Stephen Harper in National Review.

Also, the good Capt'n meets with Karl Rove:

This was an interesting chat. We had met once before, on our trip to Washington DC almost exactly a year ago, and he still recalled our conversation. The conversation remained mostly fixed on elections and campaigning -- obviously his forté -- but he remembered teasing me about all of the blogging I had done on Canadian politics. Rove told me that he had the chance to spend some time with Stephen Harper and was pleasantly surprised about how geniune the Canadian PM was. He and I agreed that Harper's transparency played against him for too long; Liberals tried for years to make his openness into some sort of false front that masked a "hidden agenda". Canadians now have found out how wrong that assessment was.

Let the moonbattery commence!

I was watching the BBC world news last week and the story came up of George Bush vetoing the stem-cell research bill that the Senate had recently passed. This was such a befuddling development that the anchor had to bring in one of the BBCs "expert" observers of American politics to puzzle out what it all meant. They eventually decided that it was Bush's attempt to shore up his religious whacko Republican base prior to the midterm elections in November. It couldn't mean anything else, considering that it went against the wishes of prominent Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nancy Reagan.

Let me float an alternate theory: He vetoed the bill because he thought it was the right thing to do. This would no doubt be a shocking concept to journalists, who find ulterior motives in everyone's actions but their own, but let's take it at face value.

The President obviously felt strongly about it enough that he cast his first -- and only, to date, veto to kill it. It's reasonable to assume that his view is informed by his Christian beliefs. But were there any other reasons?

Leaving aside the morality of the issue, there are more practical considerations, such as the fact that embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research has been, for all its grandiose claims and lavish, uncritical media coverage, a bust. Michael Fumento, writing in National Review, points out that there is much happening in non-destructive adult stem-cell (ASC) research, versus very little in ESCs.

ESCs certainly in theory are promising -- the raw plastic from which humans and all their components are molded. The problem is that we don't understand very well the process by which ESCs are inspired to form heart muscle or nerve tissue or what-have-you. Charles Krauthammer details one early attempt at using ESCs:

We have already had one such experience, a human stem cell experiment in China. Embryonic stem cells were injected into a suffering Parkinson's patient. The results were horrific. Because we don't yet know how to control stem cells, they grew wildly and developed into one of the most primitive and terrifying cancers, a "teratoma." When finally autopsied�the cure killed the poor soul�they found at the brain site of the injection a tumor full of hair, bone and skin.

Much was made last month of an experiment in which ESCs from mouse embryos were partially successful in repairing spinal damage in rats. This is, I suppose, good news for rats, but much, much more testing on higher-order animals (pigs next, probably dogs later and then monkeys) is required before we learn if there are implications for humans. That's one of the few success stories for ESCs.

This contrasts with over 1100 clinical trials (on humans) and 70-90 conditions that are more or less amenable to treatment with ASCs and stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood, etc. ASCs are far more controllable and predictable in behavior.

Note that the ban on funding ESC research (apart from the twenty-odd existing stem-cell lines approved by the government) only involves paying out federal dollars for it. President Bush has no authority over individual States funding it (indeed, Gov. Schwarzenegger recently approved $150 million for ESC research in California) or over private research projects.

One argument I've heard is that unless the US government funds basic research for ESC, the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industry will steer clear of it. Let's look at the numbers:

From fiscal years 2002 to 2005, the government funded about $850 million in stem-cell research. More than $760 million went to adult stem cells; about $93 million was spent on embryonic stem cells, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Let's assume that the overall budget remained the same, with the priority switched to funding ESC research. $760 million (over a 3-year period) is a lot of money; it's also easily within the envelope spent by Big Pharma for R&D, clinical trials and to steer a single line of drugs through the regulatory process. (And of course every penny of it will be recouped from future consumers.)

Are we to assume that, say, Merck or Pfizer wouldn't outlay that amount of money to steal a march on their competitors? Especially with the (alleged) potential of ESC therapy. Cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, paralysis? How profitable would those be? Or are their scientists far more pessimistic about the issue than opportunistic politicians (remember John Edwards?) and their science-illiterate cheerleaders in the press?

I haven't had the time to do an exhaustive roundup of ESC protocols in other countries, but here are some of Canada's:

Research can only use embryos created by in vitro fertilization that are no longer wanted for reproductive purposes. This means the creation of human embryos solely for research purposes is prohibited. Also, cloning human embryos is not allowed.

The use of stem cells in reproduction is not allowed.

Combining non-human stem cells with a human embryo or fetus is not allowed.

Embryos used in research must not exceed 14 days old (two weeks post-fertilization).

There must be free and informed consent from the donors of the stem cells or other reproductive material. This consent must be renewed when the time of the actual research comes so donors have a clear opportunity to change their minds.

No commercial transactions or financial incentives are allowed when it comes to the donation or creation of reproductive material.

Research on stem cell lines created outside of Canada and imported for research purposes will only be permitted if the stem cells were created in accordance with CIHR's guidelines.

So Canada is somewhat more permissive in its regulations, but still prohibits the deliberate creation of embryos for research. We do, however, allow the use of embryos that would be otherwise discarded or frozen indeterminately. This seems to make sense, but it still carries a nasty whiff of utilitarianism with it. One imagines that Nazi doctors could have similarly rationalized their medical experiments on concentration-camp inmates: "They will soon all be dead, and they are only Jews anyway. (Ears are perking up at the BBC.) It will save the lives of German sailors and airmen."

Speaking of the Germans, what's up with this?

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Germany pressed its EU partners to ban European funding for embryonic stem-cell research, a day after President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have expanded such work in the United States.

"The European Union science programme should not be used to give financial incentives to kill embryos," German Research Minister Annette Schavan wrote in a letter seen by Reuters on Thursday before a meeting on EU science funding on Monday.

Or it could be that a good many people have thought long and hard about the issue and have concluded that there are ethical bright lines that we cross at our peril.

FARK was recently running a contest to duplicate famous album covers using MS Paint. Even with a graphics tablet and stylus it's a bit like using an Etch-A-Sketch. (Paint is the drawing program included with Windows. If you've never played around with it, you can run it by clicking Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint.)

This is not to say that you can't create good (if somewhat lifeless) pictures with Paint. The artist who created this estimates it took about 500 hours of work, and I can fully believe it.

For that matter, you can use Etch-A-Sketch.

Via J-Walk Blog

I confess. I didn't see this until one of his commenters picked up on it:

Sen. Kerry, a career Vietnam veteran . . .

A nice little twist of the knife from Scott Ott of Scrappleface.

This blog isn't only about gritty geopolitical analysis and incisive commentary on world events, you know. Sometimes a guy just likes to kick back and play with his pretty dollies.

My pretty dolly would be even prettier if the stupid Javascript code worked and you could see the twinkling animated backgrounds. Click on the picture to go to the site and design your own pretty dolly, one that looks like a celebrity. You can change her hair, mouth, etc., which is a good thing, because the only celebrity I can think of with those manga-styled eyes is Marty Feldman. If you want to, you can design a pretty boy dolly, too. *

*Not that there's anything wrong with that.**

-------------------
**You sicko.

STEVE HENDRICKSON: Okaaayyy! We'll, uhh, be moving along, officer. Chad, Todd-- stay away from the scary fat man. He looks like a "biter."

CHRIS "COBRA" MATTHEWS: Oh, I'm nothin' but a gun and a badge? Here, let me put down my gun and badge. Now I'm just like you. Let's finish this.

TODD HENDRICKSON: I'm scared, Daddy. He looks like he wants to sit on my head.

As part of my policy to bring you the "Best of the Blogs"; if a day or two late, much beyond the point where a trackback would get me any traffic; let alone he'd put me on his blogroll in gratitude: Ladies and gentlemen, the inimitable . . . Ace! Of! Spades!

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth (July 26, 1856) of George Bernard Shaw. By coincidence, I was going through some notes and I came across this rememberance of him by Bertrand Russell. I'd been unsuccessfully looking for it on the Internet for years. It seems to sum up the old fool nicely:

He wanted to be witty at all costs and it led him into unbelievable cruelties. He taunted [H.G.] Wells with facetious remarks about his wife -- Wells's wife -- when he knew very well she was dying of cancer.

Alistair Cooke, Six Men, p. 166, Knoph, 1977

(The title of the post comes from an anecdote in Richard Ellmann's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oscar Wilde. One day Wilde ran into GBS. Shaw said that he was thinking of starting a new magazine. Wilde asked him what it would be called, to which he replied, "Shaw! Shaw! Shaw!"

"Oh. And how will you spell it?")

Because a day without a pointless Flash thingy is like a day without, um, a pointless Flash thingy.

Click on the small picture, then one of the floating upside-down helmets (?) to start.

It's somewhat interactive; move your cursor over the galloping horses, for example.

This sounds like a lot of work for a pointless Flash thingy; but trust me -- at the end of it you'll say, "Now that was a pointless Flash thingy."

Warning: Music.

As you might gather from the name, this is a 3D version of Tetris. It's actually a port of an old DOS game called Blockout, which I played a lot, more years ago than I care to remember.

It looks quite difficult, but it's brilliantly designed and very intuitive. I actually found it easier to play than the original Tetris. There are some unobtrusive sound effects.

Or if you'd rather have a copy of Blockout itself, you can get it here. It's a ZIP file, so you'll need a program like WinZip or 7-Zip to unpack it. It runs fine on a modern machine in either a DOSbox or from Windows. The sounds don't play though, at least in Windows XP.

If you're looking for some other older games, the above Home of the Underdogs is the premiere "abandonware" site. It collects games from publishers no longer in business, or who've given their OK to distribute a particular game.

The Corner:

�Displaying a sculpture to encourage discourse about the sexual power debate surrounding the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency is very much in line with our mission as a museum,� noted Daniel Gluck, Executive Director. �We are wholly dedicated to the exploration of the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality. Historically, leaders are often expected to possess an exceptional amount of virility or fertility with displays of that sexual power often tied to their success. The artist�s portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a president who also happens to be a sexual being conveys the message that a woman need not squelch her sexuality in order to succeed as leader of the free world.�

Actually, if I saw this . . . thing coming at me, sex would be about the last thing on my mind.

The sculptor, one Daniel Edwards, is also responsible for the Britney Spears sculpture (possibly NSFW) of a few months ago.

Some opine that it (Hillary, not Britney) looks more like Steve Buscemi. Others say Jimmy Carter. With all due respect, these people are idiots. The inspiration for "Hillary" was clearly . . .

On the shootings in Seattle, Steve H. comments:

I don't know why the left calls conservatives "chickenhawks" and claims we're afraid of Muslims because we don't all join the military. When you're in a war with Muslims, the military is the safest place to be, because the military is the thing Muslims are least likely to attack.

Hanan at Grow-A-Brain recently had his 5-millionth hit and is celebrating with a contest of sorts: Leave a comment, even just a "Hello!" at this post. When he gets 500 comments, he'll select one at random and give $100 to that person. Really.

There's still about 100 spots available, so get cracking.

The Ottawa Citizen:

But even the mayor couldn't help Public Works Minister Michael Fortier, Harper's Quebec lieutenant and stand-in for the event. Fortier's remarks were swallowed up in a rising tide of boos, which then grew more deafening as much of the crowd began slamming their folding seats up and down. Harper has promised to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage in Parliament.

"Shame! Shame! Shame!" spectators cried, wagging their upraised fingers in unison.

Does anybody think that had Stephen Harper shown up for this wankfest that he wouldn't have been treated to the exact same infantile tantrum? Or that the CBC wouldn't have run with it as their top story?

Maybe he should have gone, and shown them for the oafs they are.

Via Nealenews

If you're anything like me, the sport of show jumping leaves you cold; of interest, primarily, when the horse stops short and the rider goes flying off his mount.

Nevertheless, this simulation is nicely done and worth a look. There's music (appropriately, classical) and sound effects, most notably the clop clop clop of hooves.

Via Ursi's Blog

I haven't so much as looked at the pictures from Qana. I don't need to see them: War is hell. I don't need to see slain children to understand the concept.

But other people have looked at them, and are starting to question some glaring discrepancies in the Hezbollah/MSM accounts of what happened.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

National Public Radio’s correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were “too poor” to leave the down, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN’s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.

You would think that the hard-bitten cynics (as they style themselves) of the MSM would be making some inquiries into these matters.

Alas, that wouldn't slot so neatly into their pre-written templates of Israeli brutality.

Lazy, incurious and credulous. It's starting to remind me of the Massacre of Jenin.