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Monday, Apr 10, 2006

*grunt*

"From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq--an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat--al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough."

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Sunday, Apr 09, 2006

swing set

still sports-viewing free since november but i did take a peek at the masters leaderboard this morning. pretty sweet. looks like the top 5 players in the world (last time i checked) are all within 4 strokes of the lead, and fan favorite, fred couples, is one shot behind phil mickelson. almost makes me want to watch.....

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Friday, Apr 07, 2006

the gospel truth

et tu, judas?

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day-o

"While the Romans have directly given us the names of the months, we have immediately derived those of the days of the week from the Saxons. Both among the Romans, however, and the Saxons, the several days were dedicated to the chief national deities, and in the characters of these several sets of national deities there is, in nearly every instance, an obvious analogy and correspondence; so that the Roman names of the days have undergone little more than a translation in the Saxon and consequently English names."

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Wednesday, Apr 05, 2006

my wrist still hurts

meet the new toy, same as the old toy.

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Monday, Mar 27, 2006

orange-aid

"While the United States constitutes 5% of the world's population, this “land of the free” holds 25% of the world's prisoners – a third to a half are there for drug offenses . With all the talk of Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, many overlook that we have a Gulag Prison System here at home, fueled by our drug laws."

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Sunday, Mar 26, 2006

shaggsadelic

"DEPENDING on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were "better than the Beatles." More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in "the fetal position, writhing in pain," declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were "hauntingly bad," and added, "I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tobasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again." Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs' album "Philosophy of the World" will further confound. The music is winsome but raggedly discordant pop. Something is sort of wrong with the tempo, and the melodies are squashed and bent, nasal, deadpan. Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars?"


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Thursday, Mar 23, 2006

cock of the walk

i think the most interesting thing about this dixie chicks song is the alt-rock black-clad cosmopolitan packaging. cant you just see the marketing people hard at work rebranding their commodity. i wonder if its actually closer to the truth. and, of course, theres the idea of "a protest song" extruded through a melodic soaring lovesong form. ultimately probably more subversive than all the other protest songs this "war" has fostered. oh, wait, there arent any others.

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Wednesday, Mar 22, 2006

hot link theatre

marvin the martian is having tech issues.

via gargaro


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Monday, Mar 13, 2006

pigs in zen

"The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist."

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