Aloha Dump

MIDDLE EAST—With the Iraq war in its fifth year, the war in Afghanistan in its sixth, and conflict between Israel and the rest of the region continuing unabated for more than half a century, intelligence sources are warning that a new wave of violence in the Middle East may soon blah blah blah, etc. etc., you know the rest. Yet another act of violence in response to something else terrible that occurred in, oh, let's say Basra. "Tensions in the region are extremely high," said U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, who added the same old same old while answering reporters' questions. "We're disappointed by the events of the last few months, but we're confident that we're about to [yakety yakety yak]." The U.N. has issued a strongly worded whatever denouncing someone or something presumably having to do with the vicious explosive things that raged across this, or shattered the predawn calm of that, or ripped suddenly through the other, killing ump...

I recall a memory from my first boat when I watched a white guy desperately trying to fit in with 4 black guys that were shooting the breeze in the torpedo room. The black guys were laughing at something and this kid was saying, over and over, "I dih-int say nuh-in" until someone acknowledged his remark- which never happened. It was one of those moments when I wondered if that kid knew how ridiculous he sounded and just how much of his self esteem could be found in the middle level head shitter. On a similar parallel, I think Hillary Clinton is just as ridiculous. She has been so desperately trying to capture the black vote that it is difficult to know what mask she will be wearing from one photo op to the next. Does she think by forcing a shallow and artificial southern drawl that she is connecting with her audience? I am constantly amazed at her ambitious attempt to get the party nomination no matter what the costs. Then again, she learned from the best. The incident I am r...

Here are some screen shots of my second shooting of Lost. I'm the guy with the short hair and white robe.

After several years of study, the Vatican's International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to hope that babies who die without being baptized go to heaven. Really? It seems kind of odd to backtrack on a few hundred years of dogma. Unbaptized babies now have a fighting chance to enter the pearly gates but the Church was careful not to say that they were wrong about it. The commission's document said salvation for unbaptized babies who die was becoming an urgent pastoral question, in part because their number is greatly increasing. Many infants today are born to parents who are not practicing Catholics, and many others are the unborn victims of abortion, it said. So, to make us feel feel better about aborted babies and increased baby death, the ITC decides to make limbo not such a big deal? I am corrected in this next paragraph, specifically that limbo is not official dogma: Limbo has never been defined as church dogma and is not mentioned in the current Catech...

I had a thing for Sheryl Crow up until an hour ago. I like her music and she is an attractive woman but her latest eco-friendly suggestion has forced me to reevaluate my fantasy hook up. Crow has suggested using "only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required". I just don't know if I can have fantasy sex with a person who only uses one square of tp to wipe. It sounds like something from a Seinfeld episode. To compound her ridiculousness, she is tossing around the idea of make a line of eco friendly napkins in the form of a 'dinner sleeve', thereby saving our landfills of paper napkin products. So I am supposed to go against everything my mother taught me and wipe my BBQ laden mouth on my sleeve? I don't think so. Besides, wouldn't the water and electricity costs associated with cleaning the sleeves prohibit the eco-effectiveness of the sleeve? Maybe we can offset that problem by wiping ...

An elipses is well known to the gamer community- it means I have nothing to say but want you to know it. That is pretty much how I feel about this week. I haven't been posting lately because of my work load and job hunt. This week has been traumatic on the scale of newsworthy events and I have been blogging, but only in the capacity of leaving comments on two other blogs. I have exhausted the topic of the VA Tech shootings and frankly, I just don't want to talk about it anymore. Here are the links and I apologize for my laziness. OpinionNation's analysis of the VT shootings BiG Lizard: Fighting Back

I remember the Transformer cartoons when I was younger, maybe 8th grade time frame, although it was my brother Chris that had all the metal toys. I never got into the history of the alien robots turned earthly vehicles but it was entertaining to watch and even more so to try and change the toys back and forth from thier 2 forms. I saw previews of the new movie when I went to see 300 and I have to admit it does look like a good movie, even if the plot sucks and just consists of showing the robots changing forms. The few trailers I've seen show a great mix of special effects and editing. A friend of mine passed on a link that shows some leaked photos and movie designs of the robots. I am certainly no expert on the Deceptacon/Autobot lore but I do remember enough to know that the leader of the Deceptacons was a huge gun and not an alien jet that he portrays in the movie. Another example of creative license is Bumblebee's new form- not the perky little VW Bug he was in the cartoon ...

I haven't commented on the O'Donnell foot-in-mouth syndrome, sans her defeatist battle with The Donald, but her recent garrulous rant on The View has just pushed me over the edge of quiet onlooker disgust. In case you change the channel every time that heifer-loaf appears on the television, and who appropriately puts the "boob" in 'boob tube', claimed that the Iranian kidnapping of the 15 Brit sailors and Marines was a hoax concocted by the U.S. to incite a war with Iran. I'm going to give you an opportunity to read that again. The ridiculousness of this claim gives credence to the nickname that O'Donnell and those like her give to the word loon. I don't mean looney, like the context of the word in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but loon as in the water fowl. If you have ever heard the cry of the loon you will no doubt recall the eerie sound it makes as its call echoes over the lake. Faint, but yet so powerful. The call makes me wonder if God put a permane...

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

Cathy Seipp was a 49-year-old newspaper columnist and conservative blogger, who had come from Manitoba, Canada, to become the sharp-tongued doyenne of the Los Angeles media scene, was only hours away from losing her years-long fight with cancer, leaving behind a 17-year-old daughter, a lifetime of work as a plucky and plain-speaking wordsmith, and the respect of colleagues from both sides of the political spectrum. Cathy had a nemesis and as she lie on her deathbed last week he struck with his last desperate and vain attempt at griefing her. Just hours before her death, "Cathy Seipp" suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www.cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more of a bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed "very last blog entry" called her years of journalism a "shoddy," "despicable" and "irresponsible" career as a “fourth-rate hack.” Her political stance? All a m...

I came across an article in the New Zealand Herald that has an interesting piece about the 15 British military personnel taken hostage by Iran. Clearly, Iran is not the calculating chess player I thought they were; instead, they are a bumbling and desparate nation who is at the end of its rope. But I digress. The author of the piece, Gwynne Dyer, chose a spectacular and attention grabbing title- How to start a war- American style . Dyer contends that had Iran came across an American boarding party there would have been a shootout and the United States would now be at war. He bases this claim on a few out of context quotes by the XO of the USS Underwood, a frigate assigned to help out the British ship Cornwall, the ship the boarded RIB's came from. I'm sure the XO was frustrated and pissed that the Brits were taken and perhaps insinuated, "Why didn't they shoot those bastards instead of getting captured?" I had the same reaction also. I doubt the XO had all the in...

The recent story about the two men who beat into unconsciousness an Army Sergeant and his wife in a parking is still brewing strong feelings. A local paper featured a commentary by Rick Hamada who labeled the two thugs as "lawless rogues" and "cretins". Many readers wrote in with their outrage and felt the attacks were a disgrace to the people of Hawaii. Please read his article because it will lend credence to something a few paragraphs down. Hamada’s article caught scrutiny from a local woman who tried, in vain, to make the two thugs out as the victims. Unbelievable. Puesta Wong , in her first sentence of her letter titled Paakaula defense, says, "There is really nothing that should excuse or rectify the Waikele beating of what Rick Hamada describes as an 'innocent' military couple." Of course the discerning reader will pick up right away that Wong intends to do just the opposite with her presumptuous use of quotations. What follows would rival...