Category: long story short

The Pumpkin TideRichard Brautigan I saw thousands of pumpkins last nightcome floating in on the tide,bumping up against the rocks androlling up on the beaches;it must be Halloween in the sea.

Going on a belated birthday-related wine country outing today. Napa in the rain. We’ll be touring Domain Chandon where a friend is the chief wine maker. Maybe stop by Rafanelli as well. I can’t complain about the rain. Lord knows we need it. And the ground smells good all around the house. Wine country in…

This L.A. Times article, The Secret War, scares the pants of me: Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically expanding its ‘black world’ of covert operations By William M. Arkin, William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail: warkin@igc.org SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — In what may well…

Just finally put away the suitcase from the wedding a few weeks back. Why do I leave things like that? What finally triggered the desire to deal with it? Doesn’t it feel nice to have it off the floor?

Compete and win! Antifundamentalist morons.org is looking to add a writer to their staff and are holding a competition to select the lucky winner. Your prize will be a thrice-weekly voluntary column and a large and growing readership. I’d compete if I didn’t already have 48 hours of work to do every day and I’d…

I guess even when his team is winning the spin never ends: In his Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan slips in “…for the tax cuts” as presumably one of the motivating factors that led the electorate to give Bush both houses of Congress. I don’t see it. Where’s the evidence? Similary, the nonstop attacks of Krugman…

Taking a tip from of my clients, I moved my airport base station to the basement today. My network is funny: I have a long long ethernet cord running down the laundry chute to the basement where my second hub was set up, up to now just to provide access for the old Pentium Pro…

Caleb in orange Sam with Pumpkin

Tom Negrino writes: Following up on my post on 11/1 about Republican voter intimidation and vote suppression efforts, Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo has two current examples. One of them — the flyer being distributed to black areas in Baltimore — is one of the most appalling political dirty tricks I’ve ever seen.

MZ sends along this Arabian Random Insult Generator: We no speak english so nice so some of these make no sense perfectly. We many sorries.

low turnout for tricks or treats tonight means we have a bunch of reese’s peanut butter cups left over, some skittles, a few dum dums, and about two pounds of mini tootsie rolls

big ol’ pumpkin from the yuppie grocery up the hill

Martin Sheen just called and left an answering machine message urging me to support prop 52, a voting reform proposition apparently. I haven’t had time to review the voter tomes yet this year. For a minute there though I felt like an extra on the West Wing.

Eric Myer’s Stereotypes allows the user to construct a face by mixing and matching sixteen top and bottom halves. Brilliant job of sizing and lining up all the faces along the same horizontal axis!

Read Anil’s Dash lengthy, patient discussion of the contretemps between himself and the readers of Little Green Footballs. Anil considers the real issue to be the hatred and vitriol that risk sidetracking legitimate political speech and organization against Islamic extremism. In the midst of this he also makes it clear that the pack mentality of…

“I think they hypnotized me and put implants and poltergeists in my brain and had sex with me.”

ShortStrings (no permalinks, but it was posted Tuesday, October 08, 2002), says Andrew Sullivan reports that Christopher Hitchens’s new book on Orwell went from 1,074 to 4 on Amazon’s best seller list after he chose it for his next book club discussion. Are we going to have to coin a new weblog word for this…

Here are some Haikus Making fun of local bands. Fish in a barrel

eXile #151 – Feature Story – 18 Ways to Hate Your Neighbour – Table #1 What European Tribes Think About One Another

We are the alien overlords. I am reading in the New York Times our detailed plans for laying seige of cities in Iraq. We will attempt to control the minds of the inhabitants (demoralizing the fighters, calming the civilians), and systematically in our now infinitely superior ways conquer each city. We have become the creatures…

Kevin Tuma hates FDR and Lincoln, favoring Goldwater and Reagan. What’s interesting about this article is that he voices the “dirty little secret” of the Republican party. It is not now and has never been a conservative party, especially not in the sense of small-government conservatism. If you ask me, the Democrats are a fundamentally…