Category: long story short

  • Mick takes the bait

    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…

  • Can’t anybody here play this game?

    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.

  • Shorter Chomsky Thrash

    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…

  • I'll call you elphy junior

    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…

  • Not yet 40 and not a killer

    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…

  • Uncle Osama wants you

    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…