More bees...

Five Ways to Help Our Disappearing Bees is another green website with helpful ways to (hopefully) combat CCD.

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Yeah, I'll admit I had a YouTube embed about John McCain here a few minutes ago, but I had to rethink that. Most of the YouTube stuff is either humorless right-wing drivel (Hint: the punchline comes last, maroons! Telegraphing the sting (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) to your country club buddies so the "punch" hits nothing but straw men means EVERYBODY with brains has left the party!), or else it's ad hominem canarderie from brainless sloomers like Sirius Radio's Howard Stern. The good stuff slips choking under the effluvium.

What's with Obama? Labor Day is TEN DAYS AWAY, but he's still giving his old primary election stump speech! It's embarassing. I declared for Joe Biden back in the January caucus, but I'd understand if Joe doesn't want to go down with Obama's toy boat.

Beware of Snark!

I tried holding out for an "official Obama-Biden" bumper sticker down at Linn County Democratic Headquarters yesterday, but was told those aren't ready yet.

Regarding the latest Gehirnsfahrt from McCain Steam, I've never actually played Dungeons & Dragons, except for a couple of oddly embarassing occasions when it became clear that the only persons in the room who could still pretend in public were the "dungeon masters" and a few of their level eight toadies.

For all that, DnDers 'R Us, and we don't need to embellish our war memorials beyond what Nature bountifully provides.

McCain: “I’ll follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell!”

Dah dah da-dumty DAAAHHHHHHHHHH HUM... I forget, what was it the Flying Dutchman promised? At least he said it during the Olympics, when not even the Devil was watching. (True, but MSNBC has retold the story time and time again without end, so Jack Scratch may have caught up wi' 'im by now...)

Disclosure

I put an Obama bumper sticker on my Honda Civic yesterday. Contribulated a few bucks to himself, and to Donna Brazile's DSCC.

I could still vote for McCain, though — provided (a) I can convince myself he's not on speed, and (b) pigs fly.

Still, a fake "cone of silence debate" with Obama during Michael Phelps' bid for a record-breaking eighth Olympic gold medal is not my idea of mental competence.... Who's McCain's scheduler, anyway? Sloth Man?

Michelle Wie ends tied for 12th at CanWoop

Michelle Wie finished tied for 12th place at the 2008 Canadian Women's Open in Ottawa (Ontario). That's 75-70-69-71, tied with Jennifer Rosales and Nicole Castrale at US$36,475 apiece. Katherine Hull got the big bucks.

Technically, I guess that means Q-school in 2009. But the heck with that...!

Frankly, Wie's still got it and she proved it. She finished better than Sorenstam, Webb, Inkster, Gulbis, Ji, Pressel, Neumann, Alfredsson and a few dozen others, including some well-known names who missed the cut, my favorites being Kris Tschetter, Mhairi McKay and Ai Miyazato, none of them in the has-beens category! Wie's only problem with Q-school is likely to be boredom.

Wie is no fool, and she has her head on straight about higher education. My quess is, especially if Stanford graduate Tiger Woods will be making money with his education and not his clubs for awhile, university takes priority, and rightly so.

Michelle Wie can clean LPGA clocks in her spare time anytime she wants to. There's no rush.

Has John McCain really stopped beating his wife?

My theory is, that as a maverick former Navy pilot who may or may not have been addicted to popping speed just prior to getting shot down over Vietnam (frankly S.O.P. among Navy pilots, with designer amphetamines actually prescribed by Navy doctors to "reduce fatique under combat conditions"), McCain's notorious royal rages might actually be all too easy to explain. Why would Cindy McCain put up with visible bruising, though? I mean, with her billions, and all? It must be ruv.

On an entirely unrelated topic, it's good to know that John McCain would never associate himself with, or benefit from, such a sleazeball chamberpot of slimy lies as Obama Nation^† — yuck, yuck, "abomination," get it? Now that's a kneecapper!!!

†_{Alleged popularity inflated by massive bulk buys by the author and a few of his so-called "business associates", according to the New York Times. My guess is, they'll be using all that rag paper under the boilers at Anheuser-Busch, so it's not a total loss.}

This Space Intentionally Left Bank

Good Cops Stay Bought

Why does John McCain want to commit American lives and billions to South Ossetia? Man, that's "foreign policy experience," all right...

Midnight Minus 10 Seconds and Counting...

10...9...8...7...6... This space was previously filled with an incoherent rant about unreconstructed Clintonbillies spoiling the Democratic convention, but I see Bush has just ordered some kind of "humanitarian action" involving U.S. naval air forces in Georgia (that's the Georgia Ilya Kuryakin (above, left) came from). Condoleezza Rice, who at least knows about Russian paranoia, looked terrified† in the Rose Garden. Gates stood as far from the podium as he possibly could. George the Terrible seems to have subscribed to the "Aprez moi, le sooner ze better!" view of deluge‡.

†_{Just gas. Apparently it's not going to be a "Georgian Missile Crisis" after all. Except for John "Gasbag" McCain who seems to have promised Georgian leaders (or was it Joe Lieberman?) that he'd launch World War III if the Rooskies invade South Ossetia.}

‡_{Like Katrina?}

wtf...?

Vegan spiders?? Apparently, there's a jumping spider living in Mexico which steals vegetarian lunches from hot-tempered ants in acacia trees.

ゲド戦記 (Tales of Earthsea, 2006)

Goro Miyazaki, the son of Hayao Miyazaki and the unfortunate director of this dingy film before your eyes, seems to have been doing the best he could. In a nutshell, which is all this dog is worth, there have been Portents in the Land of Earthsea. For one thing, dragons are fighting. Herds and flocks have fevers. The King is worried. Arren, the Prince, runs up from ambush and stabs his old man dead through the lights and liver.

Although the story is spoiled already, the rest of this is Spoilers.

Arren runs away, pursued by guilt. Why did he murder his father? We do not know. He does not know. Goro-san does not know. Questions like these leap out of the shadows behind him. Arren gets crazy-eyed. He meets Ged the Archmage, also known as the wizard Sparrowhawk. He meets the girl, Therru, and Tenar, the fat, earthy, farm woman who adopts them all. There is a lot of preaching about Balance in the world. Sparrowhawk and Arren till the earth. Lord Cob's minions come around and carry everyone but Therru off to a dark castle.

Therru meets Arren's disembodied true self. Arren keeps forgetting his sword. Nobody does what they are told (except the bad guys). Therru brings Arren his sword. Big battle with Lord Cob, an "old man" who looks, genderbendingly enough, like the darkly beautiful evil Queen in Snow White.

Therru turns out to be a dragon. Light Unleashed destroys Darkness Rampant. Balance restored. Having won the dragon, who'll turn back into a girl as soon as it's clear that Arren isn't going to stick around and plow the earth some more^†, Arren decides to go home and arrest himself for parricide.

By credits' roll, Team Ghibli has made a silk ear out of this sow's purse. Lots of beautiful scenery. Random set shifts. Magic tricks. No animals were harmed.

Tales from Earthsea is one of the titles, the fifth in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea Cycle," on which this thing is based. She wrote a lengthy disemvowelling — i.e., a kind of literary seppuku with implied transference to another artist — claiming that the movie should be known by its Japanese title ("Gedo Senki") because it's nothing like her books.

I disagree. The movie is exactly like her books, only shorter — i.e., long, dull, boring and preachy. Nobody likes seeing their own faults mirrored directly in pithy miniature, in public, by their own children.

Personally, I think Goro killed off the father quickly to get it over with, and wishes he could have been closer to the mark.

†_{So much for Oedipus!}

Koan

When I was in college, I used to talk about Zen to everyone I knew. They started avoiding me. Maybe as a kind of retribution, the universe in front of my eyes (and ears) gradually filled up with Jesus Freaks, who felt inclined to talk to me about salvation. I couldn't avoid them.

Finally, as I was slouching at my usual 2-chair table in the Commons (ISU Memorial Union, but don't bother looking for my usual table, everything has changed) swilling coffee and smoking my Winston, a rather unattractive young girl stopped and asked if she could sit down and talk.

Fine, said I. Feel free, provided you don't talk about religion.

The conversation fluttered around the weather and other obvious inconsequentials, and then she ran out of trivialities and began to shake. Her lip quivered. She got up and fled, crying. I hate this story.

When Wisdom dances, the truly wise don't wait around for the last veil to drop off.

MOGO BEATS KOREAN PRO (8P) AT USGC!

The computer played Black, took a nine-stone handicap against the highly-ranked professional, Myungwan Kim (8P), and beat him by 1.5 points. Kim estimated the program (MoGoTitan, playing on an 800-core European supercomputer) achieved an almost inconceivable rank of about 2 or 3 dan, according to the AGA E-Journal (Volume 9, #40) this evening.

Click here for the game record, with comments from the KGS peanut gallery.

Cable Snooze

It's worth pointing out to the cable fables crowd that political campaigns don't actually register with normal people until some time after Labor Day. There's a long, quiet summer. Nobody but the pros are thinking campaign in July or August.

As far as polling goes, you might as well be asking hibernating bears. So, for example, when the phrase "poll of likely voters" comes up in an August poll, append the words "who didn't hang up on us in something like unhinged fury."

The question is not whether Barack Obama has broken 50% yet. That will come in November, if not sooner. The question is why John McCain is still becalmed in the horse latitudes — and who gets tossed overboard next?

Paris Pwns McJerk

It's funny I didn't notice the gold stilettoes. BBC.com picked right up on that.

Nobody believes Paris Hilton wrote this stuff, of course — there hasn't been a Presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan who could boil his own softsoap. Maybe Obama can. Does. Writing takes a lot of time (time it sometime, with a stopwatch, 1000 words).

Perfect delivery, though... :)

My first reaction was that the Paris spoof was at least as good as the "three purple hearts" hatchet job JibJab did on John Kerry (by setting him up for the Swift Boaters.) But it's not a Daisy ad, which was my second thought.

Daisy, if you recall, detonated during the Goldwater convention of 1964. Or so close that nobody ever found the daylight between those two events. Johnson only ran it once. And the Republicans squealed like a stuck pig, but Goldwater's "no vice, no virtue" speech made it easy to believe he was a raving loon.

Nope. Actually, nobody has to take down McCain, either. He'll do it to himself, by himself, in a clearly lucid moment of amphetamine-induced rage, on camera. About one week before the election.

[Update 2008-08-07] Funny thing, this is now being called "McCain's Paris Hilton ad" on MSNBC. That means, whenever anyone says that phrase, "McCain's Paris Hilton ad," the producers pull out this video (Paris Hilton's video!) and not McCain's. Gee, that's incompetent.

Finders Keepers

Waking up... The paint on the inside of my skull is old, damp and peeling. Aside from that... How's your day?

On the bright side, my replacement copy of John F. Adams' Beekeeping: The Gentle Craft (Doubleday, 1972) arrived this afternoon. Good. I don't understand how I ever let this one get out of my hands, but it surprises me not in the least.

I'm an idiot about books. For example, I wrote a fan letter to J. R. R. Tolkien ages and ages ago, just as he was getting famous, and he wrote back! I had a handwritten letter from J. R. R. Tolkien, an autograph, signed by him, plus the hand-addressed envelope it came in, and I put that letter in my boxed set of paperbacks (the Ballantine "courtesy to living authors" edition), blithely sold it several months later to the Little Read Book Shop in Ames, Iowa and did not realize what I had done for years. Someone has a nice gift, with my name on it ;-)