Hack those $20 CVS "red" disposable digital cameras into your own, reusable 1.1Mpixel camera that can upload pics directly to your computer. Plans are underway to hack the newly-announced disposable digital camera too.

This and tons of cool hacks and works of pure ingenuity at makezine.com

Judgment Day for Private England
Now, personally, I think she should be flogged. But I guess they don't do that anymore. She is a double disgrace to our military: once by nature, twice by behavior.

Just file this one away the next time some ardent pro-Amazon tells you that women in the military don't change troop dynamics. These are the words of England's defense attorney. I kid you not:

"[Defense attorney Capt. Jonathan] Crisp countered that England was only trying to please her soldier boyfriend, then-Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., labeled the abuse ringleader by prosecutors. 'She was a follower, she was an individual who was smitten with Graner,' Crisp said. 'She just did whatever he wanted her to do.'"

Either he's trying to punish her on his own by such a lame defense, or else he thinks that excuse actually has some purchase on members of the jury. And if it does, we should think about letting the French command us.

You are a Social Conservative (16% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (80% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Republican You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness. loc: (-125, 112) modscore: (48, 10) raw: (4613) Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating

"O'zapft is!"


Oktoberfest is underway!


The inside of the Hacker-Pschorr tent. Check out the sky painting.





Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue,
Deutscher Wein bayerisches Bier und deutscher Sang...
Uns zu edler Tat begeistern
Unser ganzes Leben lang!

Now if I can only get Zorak to wear a dirndl around the house....


Why not crack open a bottle of Munich's finest and enjoy some authentic Oktoberfest music while you do it, courtesy of the Oligarch.

Can't understand the Bavarian? Check out Oktoberfest.de's Bavarian dictionary. They have a German version so you can muse on the relationship between Bavarian and German. It also shows just one more way Bavaria is the coolest part of Germany: resistence to formalization of language. Quoth the dictionary's intro page: "Since no official written form of Bavarian exists, the words are written in a phonetic form based on German pronunciation."

One devoted reader sends me news of this Intelligent Design Flash Media game wherein you blow up pandas spouting anti-ID slogans.

Devoted to fusing fine Irish alcohol and ice cream once again, Double Shot Thoughts offer this new recipe.

And an article from Cnytr which could be titled: "Whoops, I killed a third of America by not following NIOSH guidelines":

Officials discovered two weeks ago a failure to account for three of 24 mice that had been injected with a bacterium that causes various forms of the plague, including bubonic plague, inside the high-security facility located in the middle of the city of Newark.

I note the sentence is just vague enough to suggest, but not actually commit to stating, that it was the bubonic plague itself that the mice have.

Sparse blog. Ueber-busy. Prepare for two very depressing but necessary posts:



Pray for the souls who died.

When Bush tells you Islam is a religion of peace, remember it's bullshit.

But he's not lying; he really believes it, because the West has been bending revealed religion to the dictates of politically-expeditious rationalism for centuries now. And if there's any religion I'd like to see broken on the wrack of John Locke's philosophy, it's Islam. But let's break it the right way. It deserves no less.

Convert them to Christianity peacefully whenever possible,
but kill them when they militate against us.

Deus lo vult.






Susan Torres' baby dies suddenly.

Move over, Job. Jason Torres just earned the right to your spot. I personally don't think I could bear what he's going through. He surely needs a lot of prayers.

God desired that the entire struggle to save Baby Torres become an absolute statement in favor of the value of human life, and so He removed any possibility of conflating the value of the struggle with the goodness of the consequences everyone envisioned from the birth of the apparently healthy baby girl. Her loss is enormously sad. But we did not save her for baby smiles, tricycle rides, long nights in Daddy's loving arms, or her eventual emergence into adulthood. We helped save her because she was a human being and deserved to live. Baby Torres' death does not alter the force of that motivation; rather, it underlines the intrinsic worth of that motivation in a grave, irrevocable way.

Since, if I remember correctly, she was baptized in extremis following birth, we know something else too, as sad as it is to think about. Despite her early death, her ultimate fate is as good as it gets. And that will last a lot longer than Dad's sorrow. Let's pray for him that he may enjoy heaven with his wife and daughter and not be driven to anguish and despair.

Ten year old arrested for attempting to give water to Schiavo "apologizes."

Most ten-year-old boys possess the ability to give a non-apology when forced to apologize. This one used it for something good.

New Orleans descends into armed gangs, rape, anarchy.

Meanwhile Liberals feel the best response is to blame Bush. I mean, the bullshit is whirling like a maelstrom from those people. They even blame the Republican governor of Mississippi for not endorsing the Kyoto protocol as a cause of the problem!! Or they claim the evacuation efforts are failing because the people are black and Bush doesn't care if they die. I mean, it's just absurd. What's next? Planned Parenthood blaming pro-life Republicans because if they only permitted more abortions, fewer people would have been in New Orleans? Oh wait, Planned Parenthood has its own schtick in place already. It's days like this when I get depressed about living in a country chock full of people who can only scream for some bankrupting federal program and blame Republicans for natural disasters. These pantywaisted, assinine thumbsuckers can't think beyond demanding that some massive government agency, somewhere, create a "system" to handle the problem. It's simultaneously maximally shackling (via taxation) and maximally avoidant.

Bush, meanwhile, finds the whole sheebang an opportunity to spend an unprecedented amount of cash on a reconstruction effort, vowing to build the city again.

[O.O. smacks his head against the wall again and again...]

WTH? Let me set a few things straight:

The U.S. has already spent billions and billions of dollars -- Federal money more than local money -- on something that should have never been done in the first place, beginning with FDR: Turning a flood plain into a densely-populated urban zone. THAT is one cause of the problem. And now, for the first time in history since the Louisiana Purchase, we can get the hell out of there once and for all. Thankfully at least one commentator got on a news network long enough to blame FEMA and the Feds for creating the illusion the city is safe, and taking all fiscal responsibility for the risks of living in an unstable environment from New Orleans and distributing it on the backs of the American people, thereby removing all disincentive to live there.

I generally know squat about regional US history. Moreover, I don't have a mind for historical facts. But I've known since elementary geography that New Orleans is below sea level, and usually in the same breath something like this follows: "Only by good fortune and massive engineering projects is the city not completely under water." I've been hearing that, in Connecticut, since I was like 8. I find it hard to believe that people in Louisiana didn't know that too. Years ago, they had a whole History Channel special on the massive levee systems and periodic decades of confidence between disasters which always led to the same end: nature does what nature does, and each time, more and more people and buildings are underwater.

If you want to build your house on the San Andreas fault, sleep on dynamite -- however carefully it might be stored -- or live in what, should nature gain ever the upper hand, is guaranteed to be the next Atlantis, that's your own choice and until this country gets that point through its head, the blame-game won't find the proper place to start.

If we reconstruct New Orleans, we are signing a promissory note for unlimited absurdity. Evacuate the people, sure. But don't remove all financial liability from living there. Risk should be costly -- that's a deterrent. We have an historical opportunity here: the city is nearly empty, and soon it will be entirely empty except for rapists and looters. Which means: the typical liberal argument (sc.: "the poor people can't afford to move out") is not just bad (as always) but now it's moot: they will be out now. Don't feed the cycle by saying: There, there, the Federal Gov't will pay for your lost house, and build you a new one, and fix all the civil engineering, just so you can go on pretending you don't live in what should be part of the Gulf of Mexico."

Other mindnumbing B.S. includes:

- Looters shooting at FEMA or National Guard helicopters, which then turn away from their objectives. I can't find out whether it was FEMA or the Guard for certain, but if it is the Guard, I can only say: it's just pitiful if our own army gets scared off by a bunch of hoodlums with small arms. Shoot back, and be done with it. People are dying by the minute and we are going to pussyfoot around with some punk with a rifle? Declare martial law and stop playing pattycake with anarchists.

- Comparisons between Katrina and the Tsunami. As callous as this may sound: please, get perspective. The death toll of the tsunami (nearly 200,000 people) is probably about two orders of magnitude greater than Katrina. Yes, we should care about our own coutrymen more, and its hideous down there, but making direct comparisons (which almost always turn immediately to some idea of comparable fiscal entitlement) just falls flat.

Abortion is Funny! Just Ask Larry King! from Macho Nachos, who has other gems, such as this one on Iraq, which begins with a dead-on observation:

"What often disappoints me about my generation is the shocking lack of willingness that we have to defend ourselves and our culture from threats - and the weak-kneed lack of resolve to see even the most banal conflict through to its conclusion."

And proceeds to the application:

"Our generation, on the other hand, in becoming weary of a war not yet three years old, fought by an army composed entirely of volunteers, in which we are suffering an average of two deaths per day, has demonstrated itself to be the most spineless and weak-kneed generation in recent American history."

Please sign my name to the declaration that says our casuality level barely registers on the scale of "warfare." We took over two whole countries! What will liberals do next, "blame Bush" for cuts and bruises? Really, we are a nation of wimps. You don't need a neon sign to tell you that -- we have women in our army, for goodness' sake. When we lose our liberty we will have no one to blame but ourselves.