Unqualified Offerings

Looking Sideways at Your World Since October 2001

Archive for December 2nd, 2007

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Terrorists Get the Dry Runs

I missed blogging the “terrorist dry runs at airports” alert back in late July. (You now know how impressive my effort to clean out my in-box this weekend has been.) Bruce Schneier took the initial results seriously, and was even nonplussed when the FBI later declared that there were valid explanations for all four incidents [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Alex Massie’s War on Drugs

In cycling and in life.

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Football Live-ish Blogging

Bad teams should not be allowed to play football. At the very least, they should not be allowed to play each other.
UPDATE: Watching the Comcast postgame show on which everyone is engaged in the popular “What the Redskins should have done . . . ” game, and Ray Brown ventures to admit, “They’re somewhat limited [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Stray Political Thought

Would the small man in search of a balcony accept the veep nomination? I could see reasons why Team Huckabee would feel like he was the man to pick. I could also see why  the Huck would be afraid to pick him. The question is whether Rudy would take the job. No balconies for the [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Who Says It’s Not the Mighty Marvel Age of Sock Puppets?

Jeet Heer, reviewing the new Amazing Fantasy Omnibus, makes himself a find:
Towards the tale end of the series Lee started running a letters page as a way of creating a fan base (a marketing strategy that would pay off when Marvel became primarily a superhero publisher). In Amazing Adult Fantasy #13 there is one particularly [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Michael Dukakis Says “Been there. Done that.”

By Thoreau
No governor of MA should ever, ever run for President. It just ain’t worth it.
Tavares, 41, was released from prison in June. Two weeks ago he was arrested on suspicion of killing a young couple, Beverly and Brian Mauck, in this small, rural town south of Seattle.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who had [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Yeah, well, why haven’t they been on Fox News more? Huh?

By Thoreau
British Muslims are speaking out against the sentence of the schoolteacher in Sudan.
In other threads on this topic, I’ve been asked if I’m trying to suggest that religion is completely irrelevant to religious violence.  Far from it.  Rather, I’m suggesting that religions come in different strains, or whatever the term is that religious scholars [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

The Only Constant is Change

So like, when did Cracked go from being a cheap Mad knockoff on the 7-11 magazine rack to the most important website on the internet?
Everyone’s linking the 9 Most Badass Bible Verses article, but don’t scant “What is the Monkeysphere?” by one of the bible-verse list’s coauthors.

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Conventional Wisdom Watch

Alvaro Vargas-Llosa anti-hearts the Fed – in The Non Republic of all places. Alas, the article doesn’t have much depth to it. It’s too short, for instance, to support in detail Vargas-Llosa’s contention that “All in all, financial instability has been far greater since the creation of the Federal Reserve,” which may be true, but [...]

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

There’s nothing new under the Star of Bethlehem

By Thoreau
If you turn on KROQ, you may hear an excellent song called “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” by the Killers. Good song. And if you buy it, some of the money will go to charity.
But this isn’t the first time somebody’s done a song about Santa turning into a crazed killer.
I guess it [...]