Able to ask probing questions better than Larry King. More insightful than an X-ray. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Okay, that last one really doesn't apply, but it's still, once again, time for The Friday Five's evil doppleganger, The Cheddar X, to raise its head and belch a loud, cheesy, smelly belch. So, let's begin.
1. What's your worst alcohol related experience?
Let us journey, you and I, to a time nine years ago. Ryan Rhodes was 19 years old, and he thought himself to be as invincible as pretty much every 19 year old does. I was attending a weekend party in LaCrosse, Wis. with several buddies, and the beer and hard liquor were flowing freely. Then, the munchies hit, and everyone was talking about how great some Taco Bell would taste. I decided to surprise my friends by sneaking off and buying a buttload of burritos and bringing them back to the party.
Ah, but I was drunk. Nay, wasted. And, LaCrosse is not a city that can be easily navigated when one is stumbling stupid. Oh, and driving drunk is monumentally idiotic in its own right. But, what did I care? I was invincible, after all.
About 40 minutes into my journey, I was lost on some unknown road heading well away from LaCrosse, and flashing lights were in the rearview mirror. I remember feeling a touch of relief knowing that I was going to be pulled off the open road, because by that time I was driving with one eye closed to prevent drunk double-vision.
The officer asked me to perform a slew of roadside human tricks, and I refused to do any of them, because I knew I'd fail and I didn't want to embarras myself any more than I already was. So, out came the breathalizer, which I was willing to do, and I blew a .17. Off to jail I went.
At the jail, I was processed, which included a more accurate blood draw test, which upped my BAC to .247. To put it mildly, I was bombed. Of course, none of my friends knew what happened to me, and I had no idea who to even call, so I sat in jail until 4:30 p.m. the next day, playing solitaire with a deck of cards that consisted of two match books that had been artistically altered to serve as the missing ace of spades and the jack of diamonds. I also read from some really bad fantasy paperback.
I haven't gotten behind the wheel after drinking since. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
2. What's the absolute dumbest thing you've done?
See answer to Question #1. Also, detonating a grenade in my backyard. Oh, and shooting myself in the foot with a B.B. gun.
3. What is your biggest crossroad in life? That is, what choice, action, non-action most brought you to where you are instead of where you might have been?
Deciding on a college major after three years of floundering. I went from half-heartedly going for an English major/history minor with a teaching certificate to a mass communications/journalism major/history minor, and I took to it like a duck to water (with a few interesting adventures along the way).
4. Who are your favorite bloggers and why?
Plain Layne, for her honesty, stellar writing, and her ability to make me stop and think about things I normally wouldn't stop and think about. Daintily Dirty, for her ability to irritate the living shit out of me by standing by political idealogies that are totally opposite of my own (and she's also an entertaining read). Intellectual Poison, because he's a lot like me, and he says "fuck" a lot. Instapundit, because he links to everything I want to find. A Small Victory, because she always conducts cool poetry contests and her comment section is one of the livliest and entertaining on the Web. And pretty much everyone else linked over there on the right, for reasons too varied to go into in depth here.
5. What's your best example of ironic justice?
Mike Tyson.
6. Which is more futile, the war on drugs or the war on terrorism?
The war on drugs. At least the war on terrorism gets results. And, tearing down the death-cult fanatical breeding ground that spawns terrorists is far more important than ensuring that Sir Puffs-A-Lot isn't smoking it up from a skull bong in the privacy of his home and ordering Dominos.
UPDATE: As an addition to #6, I give you this article. Was the battle against the KKK futile? Of course not.
UPDATE: Futile? No fucking way.
Let us turn now to a Newsweek report that, if taken at face value, makes it seem as if the terrorists of the world are winning and, even worse, are geniuses. Just an opinionated aside on my part, but loading a cement truck with explosives and detonating it outside of an unprotected U.N. compound does not, in any way, shape, or form, constitute the work of a genius. But, anyway.
Before reading this, I did a little background checking on the author, one Joshua Hammer. Mr. Hammer, it turns out, doesn't bring a particularly unbiased eye to his stories. Despite being a former hostage of the militant Islamic group Fatah, he remains a sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, so much so that he prefers to refer to suicide bombers as "martyrs." In other words, he basically supports terrorism, albeit a very specific sect of terrorism. Whatever. He thinks strapping on a bomb and blowing up a bus full of innocents is justified, which is a telling backdrop for this article about the recent U.N. bombing.
The late afternoon attack on United Nations headquarters marked the deadly low point in a week of setbacks to the United States-led effort to pacify and rebuild Iraq. At least 20 people died and scores were injured when a suicide bomber apparently drove a cement truck packed with explosives past U.S. military checkpoints and smashed into the side of the hulking white headquarters, marked by the familiar blue U.N. flag above its main entrance. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the attack an act of "unprovoked and murderous violence."
Bias check. Ah, "deadly low point," and "week of setbacks." Listen, if you truly want to call yourself a journalist, you have to be able to resist the temptation to editorialize like that. Granted, the U.N. bombing isn't a cause for celebration, but it's not like the whole of Iraq is a seething hotbed of maniacal militants geared up to blow up cement trucks. Pacification efforts have been successful, but you rarely hear of the success stories. I suppose it's par for the course to paint a black shadow against everything the U.S. does, because that sells magazines, after all.
Among the dead: special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was holding a press conference when the blast buried him under a pile of rubble. Coming in the wake of a string of other attacks—another American soldier killed yesterday by a bomb in northern Baghdad; the main pipeline transporting oil to Turkey blown up at the weekend by saboteurs near Tikrit; a water main, also in northern Baghdad, destroyed on Sunday, cutting off water to nearly half a million people—today's assault underscores again the immense difficulties faced by coalition forces in their attempts to create order out of the post-Saddam vacuum. It belies repeated claims by U.S. chief administrator L. Paul Bremer III and other officials that life in Iraq is rapidly returning to normal. The blast will also undermine efforts by the coalition to restore basic services to the country—electricity, oil distribution, phone services, water—because those efforts are largely dependent on the creation of a secure environment. The attackers, whose apparent aim is to undermine the American-led recovery effort and turn Iraqis against the occupation, have struck their most significant blow yet against an increasingly shaky U.S. administration.
Gloom and doom, and gloom and doom, and gloom and doom. Here's a thought, though. What does it say about the attackers that, in order to upset the rebuilding effort, they're willing to destroy their own country? They're willing to sabatoge a water main to make 500,000 fellow Iraqis miserable. In the world of the mass media, this somehow constitutes a genius strategy. In my world, this just strengthens my mental resolve that we should stay committed to rebuilding Iraq. As for creating a secure environment, it should be underscored that the U.N. requested that the facility be less guarded. So, the U.S. is somehow responsible for a security failing for a building that the U.N. requested less security for. Sounds fair to me. Whatever.
At a gathering point of relatives, journalists and curious onlookers, two women screamed and wailed beneath a fierce sun; the husband of one, a clerk for the United Nations Development Program, had been working on the second floor when the bomb went off, and had not been heard from since. Moments later, the women caught sight of the man limping toward them across a field that divided the crowd from the U.N. headquarters; he had suffered only minor injuries. The women reached across a coil of barbed wire toward him, but were driven back by American soldiers, who said they had orders to keep everyone behind their lines.
Okay, so, first the U.S. is accused of not providing enough security, and now they're being accused of providing too much security in the wake of a terrorist attack. You gotta love how Hammer wraps his criticism in the nice human interest angle. How dare the soldiers keep such a tearful and joyous reunion from happening!
Ambulances continued to carry away the injured for the next two hours, and a trickle of people with minor injuries, many of them splattered in blood, drifted out, ambushed by the dozen or so journalists who had gathered at the scene.
See, now, to me the important word here is "ambulances." Apparently, ambulances are operating in Iraq. Despite all the "chaos" of Iraq, they're able to operate ambulance services. Sounds like an ignored success story to me. Granted, they may be military ambulances, but then I suspect Hammer would have said they were military ambulances to augment his biased point that the rebuilding is a failure ("they don't even have their own amulances running yet!").
Faced with another catastrophic failure of their security system—one that will almost certainly come in for a major review in coming days—American officials attempted to show a brave face.
How's that for a big splash of biased editorializing? I hate to repeat myself, but remember that the U.N. mission in Baghdad repeatedly rejected U.S. security offers, despite warnings that soft targets would likely be hit, and refused to take even the most common-sense recommended precautions. But, don't take my word for it, take U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard's: "Security around our location was not as secure as you might find at the U.S. compound, and that was a decision we made so the offices were available to the people." Oh, the offices were available all right, just ask the atomized cement truck driver.
"I am absolutely certain that instead of running and cutting the United Nations will remain," Bremer said shortly after today's blast. "We have to do our best to find these people before they attack to deal with them, and we will." Bremer's resolve may be no match for terrorists who have already demonstrated an ability to strike at will.
Yay for the terrorists! Yayyyyyy! *sarcasm* Strike at will my ass. They struck an unprotected facility because they're too weak to strike anything else. To hear Hammer tell it, you'd think the terrorists are winning, and that their cause is a just one. And, boy, that pisses me off.
Bored Teens With Cash A Drug Risk
UPDATE: Salam Pax on the recent U.N. bombing in Baghdad: I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point?
Not if coalition forces have anything to say about it, and they do. For those asshats out there crying for the immediate return of the soldiers in Iraq, and those decrying the ongoing cost of the war, I kindly ask you to stop flapping your gums. Yeah, it's going to cost money, and yeah, it's going to cost lives, and yeah, it's going to take time. What's your point? We're in this for the long haul because it's the right thing to do, no matter the cost.
According to Norton anti-virus, even after a LiveUpdate, my work PC is not infected by the SoBig virus, but you'd never believe that if you were to look in my Lotus Notes inbox. When I came into work this morning, there were 65 variantions on the worm theme awaiting me.
First and foremost, I'm receiving the virus, which is to say poor unsuspecting souls who very stupidly executed the virus on their machines have unwittingly become virus e-mailers simply by virtue of how the lousy worm propogates itself. Sometimes, the virus comes through intact as an attachment. Other times, the virus is removed by virus blocking this or that, resulting in an empty shell of an e-mail.
There are, however, unnerving indications that my system may be infected, even though I never, as far as I remember, executed the virus. Apparently, my e-mail address here at work has been busily sending out the virus. This I don't understand. All indications show that my computer is not infected, yet I'm getting bounced back e-mails from recipients who are refusing to open my e-mail because it contains a virus. I did not send e-mail to these people, and most times I have no idea who the fuck they are. But there, plain as day, in the old "sender" information header, is my work e-mail address. How the hell is that possible?
To all you virus and worm authors out there, just let me offer up a heartfelt "fuck YOU!." I mean it. Really.
We're officially enduring a drought here. There are many indications that we're in the midst of a drought, with the most obvious being a conspicious lack of rain for over a month. Another indication is the dry, brown grass overtaking every lawn that lacks a diligent owner spritzing water on it every night.
Over the weekend, I actually saw a farmer inspecting dirt in his field, rolling the dusty dryness back and forth between his hands and letting it dribble through his fingers, as if by massaging the dirt, he could somehow bring it back to life. The fields still look good, overflowing with tall stands of corn and bushy beans, but there's an ominous feel in the baking air that says if we don't get some sort of relief rain soon, autumn will be a bleak one for farmers.
It's not all bad, though. While golfing with my father Sunday afternoon, I hit the longest drive of my life, thanks primarily to the ground that may just as well be concrete. I hit the ball well enough to begin with, but then it just rolled, and rolled, and bounced, and rolled. It was amazing. The hole was 375 yards long, and I was about 10 yards off the green when the ball finally stopped rolling. I'll never hit a ball that far again. Thank you, drought. Thank you.
On a totally unrelated note, I have a new officemate. After a year of having my office all to myself, I'm kinda bummed to have to share again, particularly with a woman who blows her nose as frequently as this one does. She sounds like a whale coming to the surface to breathe. Other than that, she seems nice, though she a tad too chatty right now. We shall see.
On another unrelated note, my girlfriend left this morning for a week in Kentucky. A full week without sex. Whatever will I do? This will be my own, personal August drought.
It's Monday, so I'm full of unfocused ire. Therefore, I need a focus for my ire. Let's see here. . .
Ah, I see that the morally bankrupt columnist Maureen Dowd (motto: Your quotes are as good as doctored) has a new item up at the New York Times about blackouts, and Enron, and sci-fi movies, and terrorists and. . . shit, this woman really needs to learn how to focus.
Batteries Not Included
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Klaatu barada nikto. I couldn't help but flash on the 50's sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still," watching New York and other cities plunged into sweaty darkness when the 50's equipment on the power grid gave out.
That's the movie where Michael Rennie, as the superior alien, and his silver robot, Gort, land their spaceship on the Washington Mall. Mr. Rennie ends up shutting down electricity on earth — suspending elevators midskyscraper, turning off TV midshow — to get skeptical earthlings to listen to his message. (Stop fighting among yourselves or we'll destroy your puny little planet.)
Yep. Every good column starts off with a TWO PARAGRAPH recitation of a 50s sci-fi classic. Other columnists would use that valuable lead paragraph time to, oh, I don't know, make a fucking point.
New York took on a retro tone Thursday, gamely going back to batteries, relying on ice blocks to cool food and transistor radios to hear news. Without a blow-dryer, the usually sleek CNN anchor Paula Zahn was relegated to bedhead waves.
This is the first of MANY jokes that fall flat. I swear, Dowd's frequent attempts at humor are often so bad, you'd think she was channeling the spirit of Milton Berle.
TV reporters offered New Yorkers tips. Be careful that your candles don't tip over. But unplugged Gothamites, busy using cigarette lighters to find their way out of subways, had no TV's on which to hear the tips. (Except the paranoid rich, who partied in Westchester with backup generators. Once, private jets were chic; now you must have private juice.)
So, apparently, Dowd has a problem with the rich. How dare they have money! She's particularly pissed at those rich people who have the forethought to *gasp* have generators. Did you also notice how she jabbed a finger in the side of pretty much every New Yorker, chastizing them for their reliance on electricity, as if a sprawling metropolis should somehow be able to function solely on campfires and handwarmers? Dowd just sounds cranky that she doesn't have as much money as she'd like to have. Here's a tip, Maureen, write something of quality for a change.
Residents of Iraq and India, interviewed on television, seemed shocked to learn that the most technologically advanced nation had an electrical support system so rickety it is "third world," as Bill Richardson put it. (Indians call their underperforming electricity "bijli," rhymes with "Gigli.") Steamed Iraqis offered us tips, including: Sleep on the roof and take showers. As in showdenfreude?
This is what I don't get. Critics of America, of which Dowd is clearly a member, seem genuinely giddy any time something doesn't work correctly in the United States. A bird poops on a transistor in Ohio, sending a cascade of electrical failure over the northeast, and critics worm their way out of the wordwork just to say "See? America sucks!" and then they duck back out of sight, awaiting the next perceived failure of American dominance. The power grid fails once (forgetting the fact that rioting didn't happen, and power was back up within days), and suddenly America shares parity with third world countries like Iraq and India. Whatever. What-the-fuck-ever.
Thursday reminded us of the tenuousness of our romance with technology; we spend our days using a thicket of high-tech equipment without a clue about how it actually works or what to do when it doesn't.
Oh, come on. Most people drive automobiles, too, without a clue how they operate. I somehow seriously doubt Maureen could tell you how a carburetor works, or if she even knows what a piston is for, yet she drives. Romance with technology my ass.
We have BlackBerrys that are also telephones and Palm Pilots that are also cameras and cellphones that also send text-message mash notes. We take it on faith that the power will come on when we switch on computers to send e-mail around the world instantaneously from our air-conditioned, well-lit, cable-TV-equipped, key-coded, A.T.M.-financed worlds, without ever knowing that our power might be originating in Canada — eh? — or looping eerily around Lake Erie.
I take back my barb on Milton Berle. After reading that, I'm pretty sure even Uncle Milty is rolling in his grave. But, you know, you gotta love how she's chastizing Americans for not knowing where our watts are coming from. Apparently, if you flip a switch, you should drop to your knees in prayer and sacrifice a chicken to the energy gods. Listen, Maureen, I may not ponder where the juice to my computer is coming from every time I log on, but that's not my job. That's somebody ELSE'S job, and I have enough faith in the workings of American industry that the folks responsible for providing energy will provide energy, and I'm also cognizant that, as human beings, they'll drop the ball on occasion.
Now comes news that our foamy lattes are steamed by the antiquated, overloaded system at Niagara Mohawk? I thought we'd already seen the Last of the Mohicans.
It's frightening, really, what passes as an attempt at humor nowadays. It really is frightening.
It was disturbing that the experts were having so much trouble figuring out what happened, resorting to mumbo jumbo about "forensic analyses" and "cascading outages" while lapsing into border bashing about which country's lightning or power surges were to blame.
You know, I've experience a few blown fuses in my lifetime. I flip a switch and, BAM, overload. So, I had to hunt down a flashlight to locate the fuse box and try and ascertain where the failure occured. And that's just one household. So, I'm a little more forgiving than Maureen when it comes to experts trying to troubleshoot where a failure occured in an international power grid.
Holy Enron! Who knew, until 21 plants shut down in three minutes, that they worked on the discredited domino theory? Who knew our grid was more stressed than we are?
Okay, now Dowd's rant is starting to take shape. After an Enron mention, a bash on the Bush administration can't be far behind. Because, you know, the federal government HAS to be somewhat responsible for a blackout. They simply HAVE to be.
When the blackout began, President Bush said he thought the grid needed to be modernized, "and have said so all along." The White House and Congress have been warned repeatedly by engineers that the tattered links needed to be fixed fast.
You would think that the first White House team from the energy bidness — the Houston Oilers, as they were dubbed during the campaign — would have jumped all over that.
It's all about the OOOOIIIILLLLLL.
But all Dick Cheney's secret meetings with unnamed energy officials were, sadly, not about saving us from this day. The White House has been too busy ensuring that Halliburton has no competitors for rebuilding Iraq to worry about rebuilding our own threadbare grid.
Tattered links? Threadbare grid? And here I thought the outage was fixed within days. To hear Dowd tell it, you'd think America has been plunged into perpetual darkness. But, I love how she maintains that Cheney and his cronies should have been working to head off the blackout. Dowd is so disgruntled, the power failure simply comes down to Cheney and Halliburton. Such pathetic myopia can only be rewarded with a roll of the eyes.
Tom Ridge would have been better off fixating on this weakness than playing with his color swatches.
Hey, I'm no fan of Ridge and his color coded alert system, either, but how, exactly, is her responsible for America's power grid and a surge that had nothing to do with terrorism? That's like blaming a highway patrol officer for an airplane crash.
Washington is a welter of blame. Democrats fingered the Republicans for catering to the oil industry; Republicans fingered the Democrats for being cowed by the environmental community. The only illumination in the blackout was this: Pols have been holding the energy bill hostage to their special interests.
Um, no, that's been pretty much common knowledge for, like, forever.
Just when we're feeling vulnerable to terrorists — does anybody believe our ports are secure? — we learn we're also vulnerable to the very system meant to protect us.
Got that? The energy grid is meant to protect us from terrorists. Who knew?
This has got to be giving terrorists ideas as they watch from their caves. Osama may be plotting on his laptop right now, tapping into the cascading effect of an army of new terrorists signing up every time we kill or arrest a terrorist.
Okay, what the fuck is up with that last paragraph? What does that have to do with anything? I imagine Dowd was writing this on a Friday, and it was really close to 5 p.m. She looked up at the clock, realized it was martini time, and hammered out some meaningless blurb about terrorists and Osama and slid the column in just under deadline.
No, Osama is doing no plotting from his laptap, what with him being dead and all. But, that's not the money quote. The money quote is that bizarre thing about terrorist recruitment BECAUSE we're killing and arresting terrorists. Oh, well then, I guess we should just leave them alone.
That's something that's been bothering me ever since we launched this war on terror. Critics keep shouting that waging a war on terror will only beget more terrorism. Puh-lease. The fact is, the critics are shit-assed terrified of terrorists. They don't want to wage war against terrorists because they're afraid of pissing them off even more than they already are. To them, appeasement is the only answer. Appease, appease, appease, and maybe then they won't attack us. Well, that's the type of mentality that culminated in 9/11.
Now, we're taking the war to the terrorists, and we're a better nation, a better world, because of it.
To wash out all that Maureen Dowd, here's some Priya Rai. fucking Priya Rai. Priya Rai is HOT. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai. Priya Rai.
UPDATE: It was inevitable, I guess. The terrorists did it. (found via A Small Victory)
Over the weekend, I stumbled by this little anecdote that I submitted to Reader's Digest many, many years ago. I still think it's great.
Fresh out of of college, I was working for a small town weekly newspaper, a job that required a lot of time logged in at the local high school. At 23 years old, I still looked rather young, and was often mistaken as a student, both by the student body and the faculty.
One day, I was sitting in the the school's main office, waiting to conduct an interview with the superintendant regarding the previous night's school board meeting. Several minutes passed, and eventually a student entered the office and sat next to me, sporting an angry, defeated face. Eventually, he noticed me and asked what I was doing in the office.
"Oh, I'm reporting here," I explained.
"I know what you mean," he said, rolling his eyes. "I report here a lot."
