Although I voted for the Other Side on Tuesday, I'm actually glad to see this latest comment thread. Less talk of slitting wrists or moving to New Zealand, more political strategizing. That's the ticket.
It'd help, in the long run, to take fewer swigs from the "they're all stupid/evil" bottle. Sure, performers like Ann Coulter do it on the other side, over and over. But they don't do the Republicans any long-term good, either.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Democrat win in 2008, just on a general move-on-to-the-next-crew basis. And for that reason, I think there's going to be a wild and fierce competition for the nomination. Y'all should get ready to make the most of the 2006 elections and then nominate the biggest butt-kicking vote-magnet you can find in '08.
Ummm. . .you're right about what the mood was over at NR earlier this evening, but those exit polls now look rather worth denouncing. Virginia for Kerry? As a Bush voter, I'm glad that I'm at least getting an evening's worth from this election. This one's nowhere near over.
To stick with Eliot, from "Gerontion":
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. . .
I note that no one here has mentioned the best team in baseball, the St. Louis Cardinals. (I grew up in NE Arkansas, an easy 5-hour drive up I-55 to St. Louis.)
We haven't played our own game 7 yet, and the Cards have found some interesting ways to lose in recent years, but I'm ready for a repeat of 1967.
Brett Matthews: "Perhaps the Greens and the Grays will form an alliance and we will rule America. They will call us the "G's."
With our old age will come wisdom, and the G's will tax the hell out of the corporations because we want a nice planet for our grandchildren."
Hmmm. Are you familiar with the view that corporations are largely collectors of taxes, rather than payers of taxes? Their increased costs are, whenever possible, passed along to their customers. . .
On the military front, a good book on the experience of battle itself (and the experience of it as seen from the home front) is Paul Fussell's "Wartime". His classic "The Great War and Modern Memory" shouldn't be missed, either.
The most unvarnished account of 20th-century combat I'm aware of is E.B. Sledge's "With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa". But it's so intense that it has to be taken in small, difficult doses. How people take the real thing is another subject altogether.
Yep, that must have been a Varityper we used on the college newspaper (Hendrix, in Arkansas) back in 1982. Fonts were on thick plastic arcs, four to a wheel, as I recall. Paper output, hot wax strips on the back - I was digging in a box the other day and found some of the stuff, now with lines showing through the paper where the wax has seeped over the years.
After I graduated in 1983, I got a call that summer from the two folks who were taking over the editing job. They needed everything I knew about running the machine, so I dumped out my stock, telling them that they were lucky they hadn't waited a couple of months because I was surely going to forget it all (as I have.)
The Mac revolution in my field, chemistry, was led by an outfit called Cambridge Scientific, with a program called ChemDraw. Since we organic chemists speak in structural drawings, this program was an immediate revelation for anyone who saw it in use.
My second-year continuation exam from grad school (fall of 1985) was prepared with plastic templates and rub-on letters. That was my first (and last) exposure to the stone-ax method of prepared publication-ready chemical structures. I still have the originals in my files to impress/bore my younger colleagues.
Good for you, Theresa. I'm very glad to see this post, and I'll be interested to see what comments it brings.
You're absolutely right about this not being a for-or-against-the-war question, but a humanitarian one. And in that category I put both our troops and the Iraqi population, in different ways.
I supported the war decision, and still do, with some pain both then and now. But I can respect many of the people who didn't, and I can understand their reasoning. My respect, though, doesn't extend to those - I think they're few, but they're sure loud - who seem to be actively wishing for disaster. I supposes there's an ecological niche for an organism to thrive on schadenfreude.
I'd also suggest the Spirit of America organization to those wishing to help out relations with the Iraqi population.
Makes me want to sit down and have what I write turn out to be "The Code of the Woosters".
Another strange plant-distribution story is the seaside alder. It's found in Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland. . .and along the Blue River in SE Oklahoma. Nowhere else. Makes for an odd-looking range map.
No one's sure if they're an ice age leftover, an early deliberate introduction by natives, or what.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 10 |
| 2003 | 4 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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