More Airport Hell

Are airport security screeners going to let passengers bring sharp objects on board airplanes again? Today's Washington Post says the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to announce security changes this Friday.

Sources quoted by the paper say the new rules will allow things like scissors in carry-on bags. The reasoning is that such items are no longer regarded as the greatest threat to airline security.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are said to be more concerned about preventing suicide bomb attacks at airports. Officials want screeners to focus more on finding things that can explode rather than things that are sharp.

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Airport Hell

Only 900 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers oversee private-industry security workers who screen a fraction of the 23 billion pounds of goods transported within the United States on passenger and cargo planes.

This "is a disaster waiting to happen,'' said Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who's co-sponsoring legislation to improve cargo security. "We're checking luggage, but not cargo? It only takes a pound or two of explosives'' to blow up a plane.

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PEOPLE LIE, not statistics!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unseemly economics and feminists who have ruined many families.

• Lies that have made him money.
• Made-up statistics that made these unseemly feminists money.
  

:::NOVEMBER 27 BIRTHDAYS:::

Ascanio Trombeti, composer (1544); Anders Celsius, Sweden, scientist/inventor, centigrade temp scale (1701); Michele Puccini, composer (1813); Charles A. Beard, American Historian (1874); Giuseppe Savagnone, composer (1902); Bruce Lee, [Lee Yuen Kam], born in San Francisco, California, karate star/actor, Green Hornet (1940); Jimi Hendrix, born in Seattle, Washington rock guitarist, Purple Haze (1942); Zhou Giuseppe Sicilian stockbroker (1947); Mike Scioscia, baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers/manager of the Orange County Angels (1958); David Bellion, footballer/soccer (1982).

Are Women Necessary?

Ironically, it appears that...what Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington BOTH NEED is a Man!!!!!

Black Friday

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, is historically one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year. Many consider it the "official" beginning to the holiday season.

The "black" in the name is a spoof of the term "black Tuesday" of the 1929 stock market crash. Retail employees nicknamed the day this way because of how frightening and exhausting the day is. Most retailers will open very early on "black Friday."

The name also has a double meaning, dating from the years when ledgers were kept by hand, in pen: referring to the black ink used to designate operating profits, as the day after Thanksgiving was generally the first day of the year that retailers operated in the black.

Although Black Friday is typically the busiest shopping day of the year in terms of customer traffic, it is not typically the day with the highest sales volume. That is usually either Christmas Eve or the last Saturday before Christmas.

Happy Thanksgiving

Holiday blog from David Mamet for Timothy.

Short People

Short is beautiful...

Maxim magazine, in its December issue, claims to be helping women "begin a long overdue fight against their genetically determined shallowness when choosing a partner."

Thus, the magazine is fighting back against women's "shallowness" by boosting a host of praiseworthy shorties into the limelight.

Maxim ranks 'great short dudes' ~

Angus Young, lead guitarist of AC/DC, tops Maxim's list of the "25 Greatest Short Dudes of All Time," standing tall at 5 feet 2 inches. Former NBA guard Spud Webb, at 5 feet 7 inches, is No. 2, followed by....
Napoleon Bonaparte (5 feet 4 inches), weight lifter Naim Suleymangolu (4 feet 11 inches) and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (5 feet 2 inches).

"Star Wars" Jedi master Yoda, at No. 6, is the shortest on the list. His height is calculated at 2 feet 2 inches...while Kurt Cobain (5-foot-7) made it at No. 20. Other great short dudes: movie director Martin Scorsese, "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, Prince, and two of "The Lord of the Rings" Hobbits - Elijah Wood and Sean Astin.

No Heart?

SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia RAPS GORE FOR 2000 election!

:::::::::::::::

Athlete Spotlight

Joe DiMaggio (aka Joseph Paolo DiMaggio)

Born: 25-Nov-1914
Birthplace: Martinez, CA

Died: 8-Mar-1999
Location of death: Hollywood, FL
Cause of death: Cancer - Lung
Remains: Buried, Holy Cross Cemetery, Colma, CA

Gender: Male
Religion: Roman Catholic
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Sports - Baseball

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Where have you gone

Father: Giuseppe DiMaggio
Mother: Rosalie DiMaggio

Brother: Dominic DiMaggio (b. 12-Feb-1917) - appears in photo
Brother: Vincent DiMaggio
Wife: Dorothy Arnold (actress, m. 19-Nov-1939, div. 12-May-1944, one son)
Wife: Marilyn Monroe (bombshell, m. 14-Jan-1954, div. 27-Oct-1954)
Son: Joseph DiMaggio III (b. 23-Oct-1941, d. 7-Aug-1999)

Girlfriend: Myrna Fahey (dated 1964)

Baseball Hall of Fame 1955
Presidential Medal of Freedom 10-Jan-1977
Excommunicated 1954, reversed 1962
Italian Ancestry
Sicilian Ancestry

SPORTS FRANCHISE HISTORY
New York Yankees 1936-51
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The First of May (20-Mar-1999) Himself

David Mamet ≠ Garry Trudeau

David Mamet should stick to writing plays, and not spread himself too thin when he tries screenplays and cartoon blogging.

Joke of the Day

Postscript to the Hunchback of Notre Dame ~

For though he was gentle and kind, it was Quasimodo's crime to have been born hideously deformed. But one day his heart would prove to be, and belong to, a thing of rare beauty.

She was Esmerelda. The victim of a coward's jealous rage, she was unjustly convicted of a crime she didn't commit. Her sentence was death by hanging. The man who saved her was the aforementioned Quasimodo. But there's more to the story...

After Quasimodo’s death, the bishop of the Cathedral of Notre Dame sent word through the streets of Paris that a new bell ringer was needed.

The bishop decided that he would conduct the interviews personally, and went up into the belfry to begin the screening process. After observing several applicants demonstrate their skills, he had decided to call it a day when an armless man approached him and announced that he was there to apply for the bell ringer’s job.

The bishop was incredulous: “You have no arms!” “No matter.” said the man, “Observe!” And he began striking the bells with his face, producing a beautiful melody on the carillon. The bishop listened in astonishment, convinced he had finally found a suitable replacement for Quasimodo. But suddenly, rushing forward to strike a bell, the armless man tripped and plunged headlong out of the belfry window to his death in the street below. The stunned bishop rushed to his side.

When he reached the street, a crowd had gathered around the fallen figure, drawn by the beautiful music they had heard only moments before. As they silently parted to let the bishop through, one of them asked, “Bishop, who was this man?”

“I don’t know his name,” the bishop sadly replied, “but his face rings a bell.”

Blog Spotlight

SCOTUSblog - A sister blog to The Supreme Court Nomination Blog

Agree or disagree with this Parenting?

“I don’t do my homework & I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food.”

Tasha Henderson, right, and her daughter, Coretha, left, pose for a photo outside their home in Edmond, Okla., Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, with the sign Coretha was forced to hold for an hour at a busy intersection so that passing motorists could read it.

The 14-year-old freshman already had been forced by her parents to give up basketball and track because of slipping grades, and said she hoped to improve in school so she could play next year. (AP Photo)

Assistant U.S. District Attorney

The judicial blog Underneath Their Robes appears to have been replaced by "some Department-of-Justice-ish login/password thingee," and tempts the hacker to find a workaround for some insertion scripts keeping faith to the faux-bloggers' thingee about assertions, insertion(s), honesty, and integrity.

The New Yorker magazine, November 21 issue posted November 14, 2005, revealed that the site's pseudonymous author was David Lat, an Assistant U.S. District Attorney, aka "Article III Groupie" (Article III of the Constitution established the federal judiciary; and groupie's like insertions).

"A3G", as she/he called herself/himself, wrote like a boozy débutante, dishing about the wardrobes, work habits, and idiosyncrasies of the “superhotties of the federal judiciary” and “Bodacious Babes of the Bench.”

David Lat remains very catty, in that, after months of self-references regarding what "she" likes in her hotties of the federal judiciary, his/her response to the NYer piece seems to be wanting to, ah, have it both ways.

"A3G" argues that he is no more the "Article 3 Groupie" who is the blog's narrator than "Vladimir Nabokov 'was' Humbert Humbert." He/she also says that he emailed A3G when he had an idea and that he often disagreed with A3G.

Mr./Ms./Miss "A3G" also steadfastly maintains that, "my persistent denials of being A3G have been, in a technical and perhaps Clintonian sense, quite correct." Thus, I wonder if those in the legal profession should be required to undergo psychiatric screenings!

Devine--Profane-Sublime

The Devine
The Profane









And finally the Sublime

GROW UP!

In the United Kingdom, a man threatened jihad on the fast-food chain, Burger King, because one of their ice-creams looks like the symbol for Allah.

As a consequence, Burger King is withdrawing its ice-cream cones after the lid of the dessert offended the Muslim. The man claimed the design resembled the Arabic inscription for Allah, and branded it sacrilegious, threatening a “jihad."

The chain is being forced to spend thousands of pounds redesigning the lid with backing from The Muslim Council of Britain. It apologized and said: “The design simply represents a spinning ice-cream cone.”

The weenie said that he was not satisfied by the decision to withdraw the cones, and has called on Muslims to boycott Burger King. He said: "This is my jihad. How can you say it is a spinning swirl? If you spin it one way to the right you are offending Muslims."

Needed: Crusader Rabbit & Don Quixote

The Al-Qaida bombings indicate that the radical/reactionary space of the Muslim World views the enemies of Islam as the Jews and the Crusaders.

New Stature for the HuffPo?

Will the real issue please get off the "pot!"

1. Everything/everybody going to pot?
2. Just another crack/cracked pot?
   
3. Smoking too much pot?
4. The pot calling the kettle black?
   

Veterans' Day Doggerel with More

Veterans' Day (formerly Armistice Day)

November 11, is the anniversary of the Armistice which was signed in the Forest of Compiegne by the Allies and the Germans in 1918, ending World War I, after four years of conflict.

A song in honor, of all my fellow veterans:

Know Your Rights [© 1982 The Clash]

This is a public service announcement
With guitar

Know your rights all three of them

Number 1
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a CRIME!
Unless it was done by a
Policeman or aristocrat
Know your rights

And Number 2
You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Don't mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation

Know your rights
These are your rights
Wang

Know these rights

Number 3
You have the right to free
Speech as long as you're not
Dumb enough to actually try it.

Know your rights
These are your rights
All three of 'em
It has been suggested
In some quarters that this is not enough!
Well..............................

Get off the streets
Get off the streets
Run
You don't have a home to go to
Smush

Finally then I will read you your rights

You have the right to remain silent
You are warned that anything you say
Can and will be taken down
And used as evidence against you

Listen to this
Run

Double Standard = Preferential Treatment

Paris Hilton was not hurt in a minor car accident early yesterday morning in a low-speed, two-vehicle crash.

"Out of nowhere," her current boy friend who was driving, slammed into a commercial truck in front of him. "Then he seemed startled and then kind of gunned it again and came within inches of striking a person, then gunned it a third time and made a clean getaway."

There were four in the car, including Paris...no one was hurt. While the LAPD eventually caught up with Paris' Bentley, no citations were issued, no one was given a sobriety test and no incident report was filed. This despite a (non-driving) passenger clearly being heard to say, "I'm the only sober one."

Hilton is then seen blowing a kiss to onlookers and police. Before she leaves the scene, she says, "Thank you, officer. We love the police."

The police response to the incident has prompted an internal investigation!

"The department has initiated an administrative investigation to see if the officers violated any procedures or policies"...as a police spokesman says..." it is premature to assume that Hilton and crew received preferential treatment." There were no officers present when the accident occurred, and there had been no calls to police about an accident or hit and run involving the Bentley??

Sure , sure...just like Gregory Haidl, Kyle Nachreiner and Keith Spann of Orange County gang rape fame...who also believed that they were above the law!

Seems like the police are like deer caught in the headlights when they interact with people who have connections or have had more than their own 15 minutes of fame.

Big Joke - Direct Democracy

A repudiation of yesterday's $50 million fiasco to reshape the California state government.

The only good that has come from the three pillars of direct democracy~

• Initiative
• Referendum & binding referenda
• Recall

~is that the process has solved the age-old riddle of what came first - "the chicken or the egg?"

The answer: The Terminator ordered McD's Egg McMuffin + chicken strips, and the egg came first!!

Election Day

California, an ungovernable nightmare (The Bad Dream of Sacramento) started, by initiatives and referendums, over 3o years ago.

:::Voting does not mean that you'll meet the Terminator at the polling place:::

The tone of remembrances

In Memorium ~ afterthought to yesterday's blog...

The remembrances of things past, present and future underscore our continued sensitivity to our search of lost time.

The Cassandralike experience of aging reveal layers of memory in that every day we seek the impossible, to understand another, when we can't even understand ourselves. Is it any wonder that on any given day half the human race is in tears?

Are people merely dogs who wait for some elusive bone, from our sometimes tortured relationship, with our elusive past that is often fertilized...for some, but not all...through unhappiness?

Good Bye Jimmy...till we meet again!

RIP [abbr. Latin] requiescat in pace (may he rest in peace).

James Keith Cross, 58, of Huntington Beach, a teacher, died October 16, 2005, of cancer.

Services: 2 p.m. Sunday (November 06, 2005), the Pyramid auditorium at Cal State Long Beach. Arrangements by Forest Lawn Memorial Park & Mortuary.

Wife, Adrienne; son, Douglas.

Whose VERITAS?

The naive comments of the left indicate that they believe that they have the upper hand on the TRUTH as they blog their way in trying to tip over the holy cow of the self-righteousness of the right while ignoring their own criminal element!

May he rest in peace

RIP [abbr. Latin] - requiescat in pace

Four weeks ago {Sunday, October 02, 2005}...see this blogger's post on Alfonso Ramon Lopez.

Pictured left to right, are: Al Lopez, manager of Cleveland Indians; Leo Durocher, manager of New York Giants; and Hank Greenberg, general manager of the Indians, at an exhibition game in Tucson, Arizona, March 3, 1953.

Al Lopez, a Hall of Fame catcher and manager who led the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox to American League pennants in the 1950s, died Sunday October 30, 2005 at 97. (AP Photo)

William F. Buckely Jr. meets Jane Hamsher

Jane Hamsher is a progressive blogger...so read her posting + comments about Mr. Bill today.

Chimera or Spooky?

Boodocks (Freudian slip?) or Boondocks?

Draft Dodgers

Besides all three being cowards...we know why William J. Clinton and George W. Bush were draft dodgers (girls!), but Jim Lampley is also confused about girls and war (he doesn't even understand sports)!