perfidy

Among her many sterling qualities, Republican veep candidate has a charmingly uh, let's say, eccentric way with the baby names.

If you want to get in on that action, Politics Tsk Tsk Tsk has helpfully provided this handy dandy Sarah Palin baby name generator.

If Sarah had been charged with naming me instead of my dear own mom, I would have this rockin' monicker:

Knife Pile Buckethead

And if I asked her to name my kids, they'd be Strangle Thicket, Quarter Pipe, and Sack Panther. (In descending order of age.)

My next kid would be Meat Notgay, which really makes a statement, I think. That kid wouldn't grow up to use 9mm like GeekLethal.

As the capitol of Connecticut, one might be forgiven for associating Hartford with the caricatures of liberalism: lattes, chardonnay, fundraisers at the Bushnell, and a city teeming with bleeding hearts.

That population moved out to tony West Hartford a generation ago.

The only bleeding heart left within Hartford's city limits yesterday afternoon belonged to the 78 year old man who was paralyzed in a hit and run in full view of numerous witnesses who continued to go about their business. The link to today's Hartford Courant includes video of the accident and the Chief of the HPD's remark that it's "unclear" whether anyone even called 911; the unit that arrives on scene at the end of the video was actually on its way to a different call and happened upon the guy laying (nearly) dead in the middle of the street.

Aside from the Chief's uncharacteristically candid observations came this astonishingly callous remark from Hartford City Councilman Matt Ritter:

"It's been a tough few days...Most violent acts, the vast majority tend to be targeted, as the chief will tell you, at someone who was up to no good. Then this happens, this spate of incidents where it's random, and that's scary."

What Councilman Ritter has failed to grasp is that when the people who are up to no good are trying to off each other, their horrendous marksmanship makes for stray bullets killing everybody around the target, be they thugs, people sleeping in their beds or kids playing outside. More significantly, folks' first reponse to small arms fire in the street is not typically, "Good! Finally! More gangbangers offing each other. Thank God."

It's not ok, Councilman, to have to live with rampant violence, whomever it may be directed toward.

Some other news of the day from New England's Rising Star Scar:

Man Killed in Drive-By Shooting in Hartford

Hartford Chase Results in One Death

Activist Faces Brain Surgery After Beating

Hartford Toddler Dies of Stab Wound

And in recent news, most of it in the domain of standing headlines:

2 Men Wounded In Shootings

Hartford Police Investigate Shootings

Two Held in Hartford Robberies, Shootings

That's all just since the end of May; summer hasn't even started yet.

Enjoy watching the high and mighty taking a tumble?

Generally, my response to that question would be "No, not particularly, but thanks for asking". I do, however, make exceptions, and NY Governor Eliot Spitzer would be one of those. From a WSJ email alert of a bit ago:

March 10, 2008

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized to his family and the public but didn't elaborate on press reports linking him to a prostitution ring. "I violated my obligation to my family and my own sense of right and wrong," he said in a brief statement with his wife by his side. Last week, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed conspiracy charges against four people, accusing them of running a prostitution ring that charged wealthy clients in Europe and the U.S. thousands of dollars for prostitutes.

The one time attorney general for New York built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general.

Why does he rate my interest in (and hope for) his potential comeuppance? He's a haughty bully, a guy who made his name by being a 14K prick to every company from which he could mulct blackmail payments. As NY AG, he was like a pallid and uptight version of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

He virtually never took a case to court, and in those he did, he virtually always lost. His successes, if you can call them that, were largely obtained by bullying people into plea deals. Sometimes, people plead because they're guilty. Spitzer, a publicity hound of the worst sort, prosecuted his cases in the press, and bludgeoned people into plea deals, so I (perhaps incorrectly) give the victims the benefit of significant doubt in this case.

Spitzer has also been accused, quite credibly, of destoying companies, and thus harming the shareholders in those companies, for no legitimate cause. Other than the fact that he's a nasty, pasty, little holier-than-thou prick, that is.

As governor, he's continued this "I know what's best" motif, siccing his insurance commissioner, Eric Dinallo, on the bond insurers with instructions that time was short, and if they didn't hurry up and do Spitzer's bidding, he'd..., well, he'd do something. Spitzer and DiNallo have a history of Spitzerian overreach, as seen in the WTC reconstruction funding marathon recently forced to an end. Blackmail's almost too nice a word for the games these bastards have played.

Who knows what's really behind the WSJ story? Surely not I. But it doesn't sound good at all for El-i-ot, and I'm OK with that.

[wik] Also see, from Long or Short Capital: "Spitzer in a Ring of Pictures"

[alsø wik] It would seem that this fucking guy is toast. So much for the happy ending.

Now, I am hardly hintermost in claiming that Al-Qaida and its affiliates, franchisees and fellow travelers are a pretty sick bunch. Beheadings, anti-semitism, autocombustion, and random terror are just your average islamofascist's way of saying, "Cheerio, old chap!" But this latest development in the praxis of suicide bombing gives new, and really sick meaning to the phrase, "splodeydope."

It seems that Al Qaida has resorted to using mentally retarded women as a crude sort of guided weapons platform. Once the victim gets close to a sufficiently large number of other victims, the Islamic heroes press the button and the poor woman explodes, along with - in two cases in Baghdad - in excess of seventy more innocents.

Depraved. And hopefully, evidence that Al Qaida Iraq is now as close to the end of its logistical and personnel ropes as it has always been to the end of its moral rope.

Yet, and I shudder to think at what this says about me, the very first thing that popped into my head when my mom read me the headline was this.

Alrighty then. Go read this, and then - only then - click the more perfidy button to see the image. And then only if you want to. It's warped, sick, and wrong. I warned you. I also found it highly amusing, but then, I am sick, wrong and warped. If you don't look at the picture, I estimate that you will get at least 85% of the total humor. Your choice.

Thanks to Fist of Blog.

[wik] So 18 years later, I looked for this picture again and couldn't find it. Here's a link to the forum screenshots that are the original bit. I believe based purely on vague memories that there is another sequence of forum posts that have different images, including the one above in my original post. But no idea where those might have gone. In case of even more future bit rot, here's the screenshots I could find:

This happened to one of my friends. You have to read it in her words, though, to really get the full gist of it.

Part the First
Part the Second
Part the Third

From the afternoon inbox, I thought I'd share:

HOW THE FIGHT STARTED

I rear-ended a car this morning. So there we are alongside the road and slowly the driver gets out of the car . . .and you know how you just get sooo stressed out and life-stuff seems to get funny?

Yeah, well, I could NOT believe it. . . he was a DWARF! He storms over to my car, looks up at me and says, 'I AM NOT HAPPY!'

So, I look down at him and say, 'Well, which one are you then?'. . . and that's when the fight started . . .

Everyone off the train! It's gonna crash and burn!!

BoingBoing made my morning today by linking to this incredible metaphorical trainwreck that happened last week at a Van Halen concert in North Carolina.

Y'see, the recorded backing synth track that starts "Jump," their concert finale, was played back at the wrong speed - not just at the wrong pitch, but in between pitches, so no matter how hard Eddie tries to find a key to play in that works with the disaster in progress, he can't.

Which is awesome. The Van Halen brothers are widely reputed to be world-class jerkholes, most recently proving this hypothesis by kicking founding bassist Michael Anthony out of the band in the press. That's right, Anthony found out on TV.

So, sit back and dig the horror as Van Halen do their best to carry on as the wheels come off.

[wik] And if you relish the gory technical details of what went wrong, here's an explanation.

Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for the night. Light a man on fire, you keep him warm the rest of his life.

The New York Times has a remarkable story this week about a photo album that came out of Auschwitz, with an accompanying slideshow that's incredibly arresting. You see, rather than the usual deeply upsetting images of skeletonesque inmates suffering untold miseries, they're pictures of their captors and executioners at rest and play, frolicking, hanging out, mugging for the camera, generally behaving like any people taking a break from the rigors of a job well done would. Except that the same day the pictures were taken, these well-rested and attractive people committed incredibly depraved acts against other humans. In these images, even Dr. Joseph Mengele seems like a shrimpy nebbish, with barely a hint of the maggots roiling behind his smiling eyes.

There's one woman in the pictures, who appears a few times. She's clearly a camp administrator of some kind, and she's young, fresh, and pretty. She's clearly vivacious and strong-willed; it's easy to be attracted to this face from more than sixty years ago and imagine a friendship or a friendly beer. And then I realize that behind that smile and those pretty eyes is a mind completely and totally at ease with sorting families into keepers and corpses every single day, and I want to puke myself dry.

Thank the deity of your choice that such an artifact exists, and is in the hands of the National Holocaust Museum. For the danger, as we all know intellectually but tend to forget in our guts, is not from overt acts of monstrousness, but in the workaday -- yes -- banality of evil.

Thank Goodness that Patton put up that li'l thing about Romanian IRS scammers, because I was about to go nucular in an attempt to spark some posting around here.
Namely, I was going to challenge my fellow ministers to kick this off the front page as quickly as humanly possible:

Oops. Did I say that out loud?

I'm sorry, but I always thought of Jenna Bush as the fat twin, not the blond twin. I don't know why, but I've only been able to remember how to tell the twins apart by their relative chunkiness to one another rather than by hair color. Of course, one day I noticed that one is weaselly-faced like her father and the other one has that weird wicked stepmother face where she's seemingly friendly, but going to slit your throat. Oh. I guess I haven't told you guys that white people kind of scare me sometimes because they look like reptiles. (I must have watched V on tv too much as a kid.) Mrs. Shrub distinctly lacks an upper lip which is what makes me think that about her. But I digress.

At any rate, the fat one is getting married to the scion of a prominent Virginia Republican family. Whoopdeedoo. Not sure why CNN is posting it as breaking news, but I do like the stupid haircut that boy has at a black tie affair. It's awful and Karl Rove should have done something about it. I am sure SOMEONE at the White House could point that boy to a decent hairdresser of Pennsylvania Avenue. Shit, I know a few people who can do a bang up fade with a pair of clippers for free. As always, I'm glad to oblige with a weed wacker. As I once told another fat twin, "Moppy hair only looked good on the Beatles, now get a haircut."

Awhile back I toyed with the idea of regular posts alerting our reading public about the kooky junk I saw on a regular basis on my way to work.

I never did, because 1, it would have meant regular posting which I am not against, mind you, but am basically incapable of; and 2, I left the job to which I commuted, which took me over the sketchiest bits of Crackton and was the source of the enterprise in the first place. All kinds of stuff the poor, miserable, or spiteful threw from passing cars wound up on that little spur off the interstate except the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink however was a victim, still sitting in a busted up vanity on the side of the highway, long dead and just waiting for porcelain-eating vultures to start in on the carcass.

Anyway, I still have alot of highway driving for my new gig, but none of it cuts through the city. Although my new commute does take me through some nasty streets of Little Newark, I'm too focused on not getting carjacked to notice much else.

So, the other day I did see something on the highway I'd never seen before: the most grisly roadkill ever.

To be sure I have seen the gruesome remains of prior victims of the critter-bumper interface. One time in particular, out in the leafier parts of the state, I came upon the aftermath of a moose that had been thoroughly killed by a big tour bus coming back from a casino. Oh-dark-thirty, middle of nowhere on a dark stretch of interstate and whammo. Now, what I saw that time was very messy indeed, but the body was long removed and all that remained was a gory swath in the road and bit of busted headlight and bumper on the median. The rest was left to the imagination.

But what I saw last week was still...eh, fresh.

I was tooling along when suddenly the traffic started thickening up in a place and at a time when it never does. That is, the mouthbreathing fuckwits who usually do mess up everybody's commute by rear-ending each other or catching their cars on fire typically do it closer to the city proper. This was still in suburb terrain. After many miles of stop and go, it turned out that everyone was slowing to go around the...scene.

I *think* it was a deer.

What I saw was...ok, I've poked around my thesaurus and racked my brain for a better choice of words, but I just come back to "pile".

It was a big pile of deep red glop, with a single tawny leg stiffly sticking out of it.

And that's it.

Whichever of Deity's wonders that animal had been the night before, by that morning it had been reduced to its basic components and left in a heap. It was almost as if a petulant child-God had started to create a lifeform and had begun monkeying around with some parts, but then got bored and went out to round up some of his God chums to find something more fun to do, like inspiring mortals to wage wars in their names, and have a good solid holy yuk at it all. Meanwhile his model animal project was left in the corner, unfinished, perhaps to complete later, perhaps never to complete at all.

It was like that.

Found in today's NY Times:

Correction: Just Don’t Call Them Inexpensive

Published: July 5, 2007

An article last week about inexpensive dresses misstated the name of a clothing store on Broadway. It is Yellow Rat Bastard, not Dirty Yellow Bastard.
(Go to Article)

Microsoft's innovative (if, by innovative, you mean taking ideas that have been kicking around for twenty years and putting them in an overpriced and stunningly unwieldy form factor and calling it "revolutionary") Surface computer was debuted at the D conference a little while ago.

Here's a new take on it.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

Drunkle Hitch has, as expected, weighed in on the passing of Jerry Falwell. I'm not one to speak ill of the dead, but I do loves me a good savage rant from everyone's favorite lit'ry critic and erstwhilely leftist drunken uncle!

"The evil that he did will live after him."

Someone buy that man another Remy Martin!!

I'll just ask the question: When you see a story like this one:

Deadly insurance fraud case nears trial

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer Mon May 7, 2:24 PM ET

NEW YORK - When Basdeo Somaipersaud's body was found in his favorite park in 1998, his family assumed he cracked his head during one of his drinking binges. But an autopsy detected small puncture wounds on his torso, and a sedative sometimes used to treat schizophrenia in his system.

Authorities now say Somaipersaud was injected with lethal doses of the sedative chlorpormazine while he was in a defenseless, drunken stupor — and then his killers tried to cash in on his life insurance policy.

...(blah, blah, blah - not to steal the fun out of the story, turns out the insurance guy named James who wrote the policies was likely the guy who set up the murder. Condolences to the family, murder diminishes us all, and so on and so forth - none of that's my point, because, really, my reaction would have been the same if the story had been written about puppies, or hemorrhoids, or any number of other things)

...and the picture next to the story is this one:

...am I the only one whose mind immediately goes to a skit from Dave Chappelle's show, the one with the punchline:

I'm Rick James, bitch!

? Never mind, it's probably just me. But at least I can drag that AP story to the trash now.

Allegedly taken from patrol car video recordings.

• "You know, stop lights don't come any redder than the one you just went through."
• "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're new, they'll stretch after you wear them a while."
• "If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."
• "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."
• "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be chasing you."
• "You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?"
• "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I'm the shift supervisor?"
• "Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."
• "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"
• "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poo."
• "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."
• "In God we trust, all others we run through NCIC."
• "How big were those 'Just two beers' you say you had?"
• "No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we can."
• "I'm glad to hear that Chief (of Police) Hawker is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."

AND THE WINNER IS....

• "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."

via Kenny, my Melbourne, FL correspondent

Subject: Tragedy vs Accident

Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, while visiting a primary school class. They suddenly found themselves in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked both men if they would like to lead the discussion of The word "tragedy".

So the illustrious Rev Jackson asks the class for an example of a "tragedy".

One little boy stood up and offered: "If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field and a runaway tractor comes along and kills him, that would be a tragedy."

No," says the Great Jesse Jackson, "that would be an accident."

A little girl raised her hand: "If a school bus carrying 50 children drove over a cliff, killing everyone inside, that would be a tragedy."

I'm afraid not," explains the exalted Reverend Al. "That's what we would call a great loss." The room goes silent.

No other children would volunteer.

Reverend Al searches the room. "Isn't there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?"

Finally at the back of the room little Johnny raises his hand. In a stern voice he says: "If a plane carrying the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton was struck by a missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy."

Fantastic!" exclaims Jackson and Sharpton, "That's right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?"

Well," says little Johnny, "because it sure as hell wouldn't be a great loss, and it probably wouldn't be an accident either.

(h/t Kiwi)