Category: long story short

Then this came yesterday (late last year I had been encouraging Delshad to start a blog, but he has been on the move most of the time since then): Dear Xian, I’m now Erbil and most possibly move to some village or town far from here… I really don’t like to do that nor my…

Here’s the message I got from Delshad on Tuesday, sent to all his online friends: Dear friends, This is just a very short note to tell you that I’m now leaving back to Erbil where then I will go with the family to some village – seems the war is already starting and the family…

Long story short, I have a friend in Iraq named Delshad. He is a Kurd and he lives in northern Iraq, in the northern no-fly zone. Last fall he was trying to get out of the country, but only got as far as Syria and then returned. With the war on, I thought I’d post…

Mailed a birthday card, bought some champagne, returned a video, snapped some pictures. The plum trees have turned a lurid crimson maroon. The recent rain has polished the lens of the sky to its east-bay finest. You wouldn’t believe how many pictures of clouds I’ve taken over the years.

I realize I’m falling for a deliberate imitative “fallacy” when Nick Denton contrasts the Iraq/antisemitism storyline with one about drunken Irishmen. It reminds me of an EU chart in a late ’80s copy of the Economist I was reading for free on one of my first flights from New York to San Francisco. There were…

First they laughed Fleischer out of the room, then this petty payback against Helen Thomas, and now the stilted, scripted case-for-war, sorta, press conference is under scrutiny, according to this Kuro5hin thread, Ari Fleischer admits Bush called from a prepared list of reporters thread. Insert “bush league” crack here.

Dismayed at D-squared’s removal of his Shorten Den Beste post that finally provoked a response from the man’s reader-fans, The Poor Man offered a series of amusing Shorters, nailing himself in the process. The Chomsky one (“Shorter Noam Chomsky: Whatever someone said recently is pretty rich, considering East Timor”), which I thought was one of…

Well, it turns out immersion in coffee is not good for digital camera. Our local camera shop (down on Lake Shore, and it’s cool we have one – the old typewriter repair shop on College in Elmwood closed recently), sent it back to Canon for a $20 estimate. Turns out they can fix it or…

Noticed a bunch of visitors (to RFB) coming from an unfamiliar referrer. It turns out to be a message board for players of some online game. Apparently one of the participants is a French-speaking 15-year-old from Canada who goes by the online handle ‘xian’. The mother of one of the other teen participants in the…

Too much work, constant deadlines, and a general disgust with the state of geopolitics has made me reduce my reading of the media to a bare minimum. It’s too easy to get stressed out and crazy from the barrage of propaganda, lies, and distorted truths in the mediasphere. Blogs are no better, in general, but…

There was a time when I had my in box(es) totally under control. Stuff got filtered. I either deleted messages, replied to them, or saved them if they really needed saving. Then blogging helped, because it provides a way to directly deal with any information that comes into my box and deserves immediate public comment…

Sometimes the only thing more entertaining than Craigslist personals is the CL job listings. Take this one, PCBootyCall.com Model Recruiter Wanted. Apparently, “PCBootyCall.com is a new promotional service for adult models in the USA.” They’re seeking “professional and responsible” female escorts, dancers, and “adult companions” (high quality only) to advertise presumably on their site. Apparently…

At some point Fred Rogers’ death from stomach cancer is going to hit me, but so far mostly I think it’s kind of passed by me in a glaze. Somehow I’m associating Mr. Rogers with my maternal grandfather, an equally calming presence. An op-ed in the Times today nearly brought a tear to my eye,…

If Orcinus had a syndicated (RSS) feed, I’d put his headlines write on the main Mediajunkie page. By catching up with him today, I learned that someone actually is now transcribing Rush Limbaugh, got frightened by signs of the demonization of dissent, read about a Karl Rove lie on the record, got caught up on…

x: got some quotes of deductible vs. premium tradeoff at progressive. x: also getting a quote from gecko. b: i tried to call you earlier…D and I were discussing his coming over for dinner tonight & Buffy watching… b: then he got a call from S saying she and S had just picked up 100…

The Bush Crime Family meme I’ve seen bandied about on the Well and elsewhere has spawned a comic at the Village Voice, The Bushopranos. Where are those humorless lefties when you need them? This cartoon fights the Bush restoration/rematch narrative that put their team within striking distance of the prize with a psychoanalytical reprise of…

First-hand reports from Miguel Octavio of The Devil’s Excrement indicate that Hugo Chavez has jailed opposition leaders in Venezuala: Woke up in a Dictatorship todayToday I woke up in a Dictatorship. Up to now Hugo Chavez and his hoodlums had been using the law to “hide” the repressive and intolerant nature of this Government. Last…

My favorite pundit for these extreme times has gotten Get Your War On No. 19 out:

Tom the Dancing Bug has been having a great old time lampooning the Wall Street Journal’s Lucky Duckies trial balloon that complained about the unfair and progressive U.S. federal income tax.

The Guardian deconstructs the “Saddam = Hitler” argument (without invoking Godwin’s Law!), and turns the table on the question of who is appeasing whom. We’ll leave deconstructing the specious “Bush = Hitler” protest signs as an exercise for the class.

On today’s New York Times op-ed pages, Bill Safire applauds the bipartisan shackling of the proposed TIA and gives cover to libertarian-inclined right-wingers waiting for a signal on Patriot II: the wrath of Ascroft. Over on the opposite side of the page Bob Herbert notes the stealthy way the Bushies are defunding “compassionate” priorities while…