Expect blogging to be pretty gosh darn light

Loyal readers, faithful and true: just letting you know that blogging on this site will be extremely light to non-existant for the next month. I'll be visitng my brother in Thailand and some old friends of my parents in Malaysia, so I'll be out fo the country from tommorow until August 1st. I may hit a computer somewhere in there and have some time to throw down a post or two, but I don't know how likely that is. So, read all the old posts one more time and appreciate both their humor and historical significance, and come back August 1st to resume your regular reading.

Lifestyles of the rich and...Jesse?!?

Seeing as today is my last day at work here at the ol' FCC, my coworkers took me out to lunch. Not just any lunch, but Bena's restaurant, conveniently located at the fancy-shmancy Pipac Centre (note that it is not speeled "center," for that is how poor people would spell it). For those of you not in the CF area, the Pipac Centre is a really fancy place (think marble floors...actual marble) where people have weddings and proms and things like that. So the lunch was as it always is at those kind of places, overpriced and focused much more on the appearanca rather than the actual taste. But that's not what caught my eye. When I went to the bathroom, the urinals were entirely filled with ice. Right up to the brim. Every last one of them. So I used the ice-filled urinal, and I came back after I was done eating (too much water to drink) and they had been re-filled. Up to the brim with ice. Now, I'm certainley not rich by any means, but I've eaten in fancy restaraunts before, and none of them had ice-filled urinals. Is this the new thing amongst the ostentaiously rich?

Well, apparently (according to this source) it's because people are too lazy to flush. My theory? Rich people just like doing things differently, even when it makes no sense, just as a way of seperating themselves from us. For example, right now Ken Lay is somewhere yelling at his butler because their isn't enough ice in the toilet.

How to tell you're losing a war, part XIV

Readers of this blog will be quite familiar with my position on the war, so there's no need to get into all of that here. And seeing as I'm a fairly meaningless person in the grand scheme of things, my opnion also matters little. However, some important people with important opinions are starting to agree with me, and they're people you wouldn't have thought would join my side of the battle.

For instance, Representative Walter Jones. You may remeber him as the Republican Congressman from North Carolina who lead the battle to rename French Fries to "Freedom Fries" in the Capitol lunchroom (also while doing so, he presumably took his shirt off and spun it above his head in a helicopting motion). Well, now Rep.Jones, still very much a Southern Republican, is one of four co-sponsors of a bill in the house demanding a withdrawl of troops beginning in 2006. Also among the signers, the best dressed man in either chamer of congress, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii).

Much like LBJ said of Walter Cronkite and the Vietnam war, Bush will one day look back and say "When I lost Freedom Fries Guy, I lost the nation."

¡Viva Bolivia!

Under the "You think we got it bad here" file...

Currently, as you're reading this (or it may have already happened, if you don't check often enough) the Bolivian government is meeting in secret to put in a *gasp* puppet of U.S. corporations. Despite the fact that over 80% of the population does not want him being in office. In fact, they blockaded all the roads so that the corrupt officials had to be flown out into the boonies to avoid democracy. However, thousands of Bolivians are marching through the country side to show their dissaproval.

Read about here.

Who reads my blog? Let's take a look-see...

So I got this fancy new hit counter (prominently displayed down at the bottom of the ol' blog...don't trust it's count, though, because my blog is much older than the counter, so it looks like not too many people have visited) and one of its best features is that it allows me to see what web page someone visited immediately before they came to my blog. For instance, if someone was googling something and my blog came up, it would show me what they were googling.

Sounds fun, right?

Well, it's actually kind of disturbing. There is some humorous stuff, such as the majority of people coming to my blog were searching for some combination of "Lil' Jon" and "Nerd," no doubt coming to see an old blog of mine with the diminuative Johnathon's senior protrait. But the disturbing thing is that many people who ended up at my blog were clearly looking for porn. In one case, this individual was clearly looking for incestuos porn. One of the many downfalls of a having blog titled "I blogged your MOM" and having an entry titled "I kick ASS for the Lord, my SON," I suppose. You can see how the combination would cause problems.

So I guess what I'm getting at, is that although I do appreciate a good round of consensual sexual intercourse, if you're looking for that, I'm afraid all you will encounter here is some witty reparte and sarcastic political commentary. Sorry about that.

Democra...what?!?

In case you haven't heard of the Downing Street Memo yet, the jist of it is that David Manning, A Biritish intelligence official, had his notes from meetings with Bush & Co. leaked to the public. In the notes from his meeting with them in 2002, he noted that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq, but the justification just wasn't there. So, he noted, the "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." So this proves that the president was (get ready to gasp) lying!

But it gets better.

So several members of congress were upset by this memo (and by "several" I mean "89") and they wrote a letter to President Bush expressing their shock and outrage. Scott McClellan, the President's press secretary, said he has "no need" to respond to the letter.

Just for clarification:
He claims to have no need to respond to a letter written to the President by 89 members of congress asking him to explain a memo that proves he lied about a war which was killed nearly 2,000 Americans in a nation which posed no threat to us.

As always, "I'm not making this up™!"

Best genre-crossing musical pairing ever?

A) Jay-Z & Linkin Park
B) Slash & Michael Jackson
C) Tim McGraw and Nelly
D) Paula Abdul and Mc Skat Cat
E) Bing Crosby and David Bowie

Which is it people?

How to destroy the credibility of something entirely credible, part1

So Amnetsy International recently came out with a 200+ page report detailing the abuses of prisoners in American detention camps. In it, Amnesty referred to the prison camps (especially Gauntanamo Bay) as the new-century "gulags," comparing them to the prisons where political dissidents in the Soviet Union where allegedly disappeared to. The point is, the allegation was always that the Soviets used the Gulag to imprison those who they disliked, for as long as they wanted and without any charges. George Bush has taken great offense to this. As he is quick to point out, our prisons hwere we send people that we dislike for as long as we want without charging them with anything are to prevent terrorism, thus making them ok. So he came out and call the Amnesty allegations "absurd."

Here again, I will predict the future.

You see, when Bush was calling the thrice-checked report absurd, he focused on the fact that Guantanamo was called a gulag, not so much on the fact that we have both video and pictorial evidence of prisoners being beaten to death. What is going to happen now is yet another show of republican brilliance. Bush and the entire wingnut media will focus entirely on the word "gualg" instead of the quite-correct charges of abuse. Then we will have big debates in the media as Bill O' Reilly yells at his guest for agreeing with the use of the term gulag. In the end, Amnesty will finally back down and retract the word gulag, and Bush will triumphantly come out and say "See! Our rape and tortoure chambers are not gulags!" and everyone will forget the fact that the 200+ page report was entirely true.

Gosh, it's kind of depressing, isn't it?