LSU is #1 college football team in the country and going to the Sucrose Bowl. God help me as they are going to be over the top, out of control, stomping mudholes, etc in and around Looiziana.
I have an umbilical hernia, which does not need to be operated on unless I go back to the hospital with a horrible belly ache. Quit yer belly achin, Maitri (harharhar). Have no bloody clue how it happened; wait, actually I do, I think it’s from my weights class. Walking is the key to strengthening those muscles and helping them regrow, apparently. So here I am with an aborted hernia.
Aborted hernia … sounds like a scene from Total Recall or Alien, doesn’t it? Aaah, aliens!
jeez…didn’t they cut your umbilical cord lready…you didn’t all have to herniate it and stuff. actually, i hope your tummy is feeling better. last week was crazy w/ work, followed by christmas shopping (am I going to hell for not capitalizing christmas…or hell…i guess if you’re already going to hell, you’d better do it in style), followed by heavy drinking at geomatrix christmas (no capitalization again???) party (note that working in the private sector is cool…you actually get cool presents at the christmas party), followed by skiing next day (wonderful morning working off hangover by watching saddam get checked for lice while waiting for friend to pick me up), followed by sleep (finally). anyhoo, that’s my lame excuse for not sending get well message earlier.
am interjecting 3 paragraphs from David Brooks’ column for tomorrow in the Times, already up on the web. i can normally handle his columns (as well as safire’s…usually, anyway), but see if *you* can spot the irony. also, don’t blame me for ruptured umbilical hernia…i’m just the damned messenger.
And indeed, there is one big difference. George Bush fundamentally sees the war on terror as a moral and ideological confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny. Howard Dean fundamentally sees the war on terror as a law and order issue. At the end of his press conference, Bush uttered a most un-Deanlike sentiment:
“‘I believe, firmly believe – and you’ve heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it – that freedom is the almighty God’s gift to every person – every man and woman who lives in this world. That’s what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq.’
“Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice, and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries who fear liberty for women.”
call me if you can’t spot the irony…call me if hernia ruptures…will send liquor to ease pain. to use tennis analogy, i think brooks just lobbed in a high one that somebody’s going to overhead smash…hopefully right into his sac. never let it be said that i took it out of context …
might also want to peep Krugman’s column for tomorrow about war profiteering. excellent smack-down point on the vp at the end.
if you didn’t catch Tom Friedman’s sunday column (written pre-capture, of course), i highly recommend it, but can’t find url quickly.
anyway, at least they finally got the fucker; now we just have to see if that’s actually good or bad for our boys and girls on the ground. hopefully will give a real psychological boost to the people and help the rebuilding (for which we sure as hell need to start doing a better job!), and cool down rather than flare up the guerilla activity.
which brings me to my next point in this tirade (note that i really don’t have anyone here to bs politics with…you’re on the receiving end of some pent-up rage), why the hell is gore (was?…we’ll see) lining up behind dr. dean. sure i’m pissed off about the general course the nation is on, but we’re too deep in iraq to walk away and/or cry about spilled milk. maybe i’ve been reading Friedman’s columns too much, but the admin is doing the right thing (poorly, though) for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean we can go back in time or that we can’t start doing the right thing well for all the right reasons. the pissed-off McGovern/McCarthy (gene, not joe!) schtick ain’t gonna work in the general election. not that i’m loving any of the other democratic candidates. kerry’s campaign shake-up appears to have left it in shambles; joe l. is trying to stick his chest out like he captured saddam himself; edwards is kinda ok (but only kinda) but can be easily painted with the greedy trial-lawyer brush (how ’bout them tort-reform apples); gephardt’s…well, gephardt; not really sure what to make of clark at this point (D or R?…or doesn’t care, just wants to be commander-in-chief)…should be a new yorker near top of box w/ article about clark; sharpton’s…well, al sharpton (cop-out description again, but you get the point); kucinich often makes sense, but is too damn nerdy for the general election…see the thing about his “date” last week with a woman who lives with her boyfriend? (on a personal note…christ…maybe *I* should try running if only to get some lame date … probably couldn’t hurt at this point!), and kucinich is tinged with the dean anger from time to time; we just don’t get to hear enough from Moseley-Braun, but from what I’ve heard, she makes a lot of damn sense…too bad the nation isn’t ready for a black woman to be prez. ok, so we need some new candidates…
tonight, i just ran across the “other” dem candidates…check ’em out at http://www.politics1.com/dems04.htm and http://www.politics1.com/dems04a.htm (at least some in the second url are actual contenders, but also note that jim traficant (damn!) appears near the end of that list.
in other news, it appears that your sen. breaux wanted to slip his retirement under the radar today by announcing in the wake of the capture hullabaloo. no republican (though we can argue about breaux’s affilliation) has held a Senate seat from LA since reconstruction, though writing is on the wall in the wake of sen. landrieu’s squeaker. (on another personal note, sen. landrieu is still kinda hot.)
for the record, the *computers* have LSU football at #1 (along with some other team…maybe OK or OK state?), but the *human* journalists still put UCLA (or USC…i can’t remember which now) at #1. guess we’ll probably get to have another round of congressional hearings on the bowl championship series because there just aren’t other pressing issues for them to deal with. WTFO. anyway, have fun with the sugar bowl thing. though there’s nothing wrong with stomping mudholes…try it, you’ll like it.
also, we got us some hot earthvision action at geomatrix now with dgi’s pay-as-you-go licensing. there was an ev user’s conference that one of the guys from our office went to in CA last week. he saw the magic of the geowall for the first time and was very excited. i told him that he hadn’t seen nothin’ until he peeped your mondo-sized curved geowall. damn….
tha’ k-dawg, over and out!