Silicon Valley Redneck

Forget the Star Registry...

Commenter "Sisyphus" over at the Volokh Conspiracy has an even better suggestion for a special gift.  Alas, it can only be given by certain people, but the rules are pretty broad.
If you fit one of the categories listed at the second link... consider giving a truly special gift this year!

An amusing parody

Ah, the things one finds while eating lunch in front of the computer....

Just found this over at Castle Argghhh!

Death to Smurves!

Ever since the Blue Menace first appeared on television, right-thinking folks have sought a violent end to it.  Indeed, the little blue vermin came in far ahead of the competition in the first "Crucify a Cute Commercial Character of the Month Club" vote, in 1984.

From Usenet to song, the Smurf menace has been attacked:

Well, we snuck into the Magic Woods, we were in disguise, now,
We surrounded the village and took 'em all by surprise, now,
And when the napalm hit, they were all little blue French fries, now,
And we had fun, fun, fun, blowin' all the little Smurfers away.

        Tom Smith, "Smurfin' Safari"

Now, at last, the Smurf village has been destroyed.  The Right Place has a report, with a roundup of reactions.

What is it with dolls, anyway?

OK, so claymation is technically a form of "playing with dolls" - and there is that new Wallace & Gromit film - but there seems to be an epidemic of nominal grown-ups playing with dolls in public.
Back in February, there was what appeared to be an isolated incident of a doll being held hostage by terrorists.
Now, just this week, we have Survivor Toyland (via the Sandmonkey), and a law professor playing with an airline screening playset (via the Volokh Conspiracy).
Where will it all end?

Update: how could I write this without mentioning the UNICEF "Bomb the Smurves!" campaign?

Big, brass...

Michael Totten, now in Beirut and wasting no time, met with a representative of Hezbollah.  Yes, he lived to tell about it.

Meanwhile, Michael Yon has posted the last installment of The Battle for Mosul.  More on how our military operates... and how the Iraqi security forces are getting up to speed.

I'm glad these guys go where things are happening and tell their tales, so I can sit in my nice safe easy chair and read their accounts of events, without the usual layers of filtering (press releases, template-based reporting, preconceptions, trimming for space and time...).

Update: additionally, Stephen Sensing has reported in from somewhere in the vicinity of Fallujah.

Lunchtime linkies

First up: Michael Totten is off to Beirut again!  This time for six months.  Past time to add him to the ol' blogroll.

Next, Castle Argghh! has a new caption contest.  Quite an amusing photo.

Then, the photo for that contest came from webpark.ru, so I decided to see what else was there.  Like so many open-photo fora, it's mostly filled with smut (some of it artistic, most not) and sundry grotesqueries, but also has some gems... the funny, the unusual, the strange, the downright deranged, and the shiny.

Rogel L. Simon links to an animated Jewish New Year card.

Cox & Forkum have fun with Intelligent Design.  Update: see also The Swift Report.

David Kopel is less than thrilled with Bush's plan to add loopholes to the Posse Comitatus Act.

Big Pharaoh is mocking - mocking, I say! - the Reverend Mother.

Ice-cream lunacy

Both LGF and the Drink-Soaked Trots have picked up on the Great Burger-King Ice-Cream Blasphemy Outrage; Pickled Politics (via the Trots) has the tale, complete with nice photos of both the offending dessert-lid squiggle and what appears to be the name of Allah inscribed on the inside of a golden bottle cap.
Hmph.  The squiggle looks like soft ice cream to me.

But... y'know what?  Looking at the inscription on the bottle cap, I've had an inspiration.
I know why people are so disappointed in the President's performance.
Everyone seems to expect the President to wield godlike powers, and yet...
"W" is one curlicue short of being "Allah".
Remember that.

Update: if you rotate the ice-cream symbol another 90 degrees, it becomes a Chinese ideogram which can mean either "tornado" or "your ice cream has fallen on the floor."

Update 2: much more at The Religious Policeman.

Insights

Fine articles by Alaa and Michael Yon.  Go read.
Special bonus points to Alaa for mentioning Morlocks and Eloi without reference to LGF!
Alaa puts the clash of civilizations in a different perspective: not East against West, nor Islam against Christianity, but Nomads against City Builders - a struggle that is as old as civilization.
(Incidentally, this struggle isn't happening just in Mesopotamia; we see it regularly in corporateland (topic for a future rant), where all too many corporations are run by Nomadic CEOs who ride in on horseback, pillage the company, and then ride on to the next corporation, leaving the Farmers and City Builders with the ruins.)

Yon starts out with a much overlooked point about news companies: you, the reader or viewer, aren't the customer.  You're the merchandise, to be sold to advertisers, so long as the news keeps hold of your eyeballs.
He then goes into detail about how, and why, the news from the front gets selected, and how simple and gaudy win out over detailed, undramatic, and important.

Not for the easily offended...

I just happened across this site... much metaphysical silliness, guaranteed to offend the seriously religious, especially if they should happen to read about Hank.  (Further Hankisms here, just in case anyone hasn't been offended yet.)

(Via Nadz, via the Sandmonkey.)

Quick Friday linky

(Quick Friday... that's the Friday after Easter?  No time to invent the theology now; gotta run.)

Cox and Forkum are leaving much to the imagination today.  Go join in the fun!

Thursday morning sillies

My Wu-Name is Merry Swami.  Eh?  Well, maybe.  My US Name is Jose Henry.  Jose Henry???  Dunno what's wrong with my own name as a US name, anyway.  (Name generators via the Sandmonkey.)
Randomly following links earlier this morning, I stumbled upon yet another peep research article.  No, it's not research being inflicted on peeps; it's observations of peeps doing research.  Go read.  Set your coffee down first.
Time to get organized and head off to a client site - new consulting project starting this morning!

Interesting times in Lebanon!

Once again, the decent folks of Lebanon are flooding the streets, waving flags, and generally putting on a good impression of a respectable mass movement.
Estimates of the crowd are running from 800,000 to more than twice that.  That's on the order of a quarter to half of the population!

There's much more over at Publius and National Review.

A total and hasty Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could prove inconvenient to Assad in many ways... one of which is bolstered by the recent report that Saddam's secret-weapon programs had, as the VRWC had been saying all along, been systematically dismantled and the materiel taken elsewhere ("Honest, he used to have that stuff!  Clinton was right!").  Fingers have often been pointed at Syria, but, when the pointing gets specific, the usual suspected location has been the Bekaa Valley.  "No, those weapons aren't in Syria!  Not at all!  They're, um, next door.  In that little country we've been occupying for 30 years. Nothing to do with us!"

Meanwhile in Iraq, crowds have taken to the streets to protest  a recent suicide bombing perpetrated by a Jordanian.  Publius has more on this, and points to further detail from Natasha Tynes.

Update to the meanwhile: apparently the bomber wasn't a Jordanian after all; the Jordanian newspaper article that touched off the protests was garbled - Natasha has the followup.

Update on the stuff that might be in the Bekaa Valley: here's the original NYT article, and here Christopher Hitchins looks at the implications.

The Flying Purple Finger of Freedom is on the loose!

The Flying Purple Finger of Freedom is running amok this week!  Clicking a few links from Instapundit, we find a roundup at Publius Pundit, covering Kuwaiti suffragettes, Egyptians concerned that the upcoming election will be rigged, and  rallies in Bolivia, Nepal, Morocco, Pakistan... and the reappearance of organized protests in China.  Gateway Pundit and Registan both cover the protests in Kyrgyzstan, one of those obscure and impoverished little central-Asian former Soviet republics you'd never think of as a hotbed of democracy.  Gateway Pundit also relays reports of protests in Iran; via Publius, here's more on that over at Regime Change Iran.
Living in interesting times, indeed!

This doll business is getting out of hand

Just in case anyone hadn't heard... G.I. Joe* has been taken prisoner.  (Click a few of the links.)

Well, now his diary is on line for all to read.  Husayn, never exactly a fan of al-Qaida, now regards them as "a rather bad comedy brigade."

Have the dreaded terrorist masterminds been reduced to very proper Charlies?

Update: a rescue mission is in the works.

* Technically, not G.I. Joe®, but rather one Commando Cody.

(The soldier in the recent hostage photo bears little resemblance to the Commando Cody seen in the undated photo on the left.)

Purple pride

The polls have closed... from the reports so far, it sounds like turnout was heavy in most areas, though, alas, light in the trouble spots. (Did anyone really expect a lot of voting in Fallujah or Tikrit?)
Terrorist attacks killed, by the highest estimate I've seen so far, about four dozen people, including eight terrorists.  Bad, but hardly the bloodbath that was threatened.
Contrary to the expectations of pundits, voters didn't immediately don gloves to cover their ink-stained fingers.  Rather, the purple index finger is proudly displayed in solidarity with the rest of the voters, and in defiance of the terrorists.
It wasn't just a bunch of pro-American cheerleaders voting, either. There were reports of people who had decided to vote because they'd gotten the message that that's the way you get rid of American occupiers: elect a government that will ask them to leave.

We won't know the results for a while yet; all those ballots need to be counted, and the Iraqis don't have modern conveniences like exit polls to give instant wrong results.  In a sense, though, it doesn't matter that much which list people voted for.
All the lists on the ballot had one important thing in common:
They were on the ballot.
This means that, however the representation on the National Assembly is distributed as a result of the vote, it will be distributed among those who got there by persuading people to vote for them, not by force.

Speculation has the Communists doing quite well, but don't be alarmed: the Iraqi Communist Party is completely out of step with the rest of the world's Communists, and can be expected to be a good influence in the government.

Firsthand reports from the cheerleaders: Mohammed and Omar, Alaa, Ali, Husayn, and Hammorabi.

Also: Christopher Albritton, and roundups at PoliBlog and Chrenkoff.  Further commentary at Cold Fury.

Ongoing coverage at The Command Post.

Overall, it looks like good news.  While the Iraqis are experimenting with election-night parties, it's time for me to grab some breakfast, and head for the hills - looks like hiking weather out there!

Update: big roundup at Instapundit.

Also, this:

Iconic, isn't it?

The Descent of... er...

Donald Sensing offers an animated short on evolution.  Or something.
No, I'm not going to tell you how it ends.  Go see.

Some insights

Ibn Alrafidain offers some insights into the state of Iraqi society, and how it got that way.  No simple summary; go read it.

Meanwhile, Ali contemplates Islam and democracy.  Surprise!  The paid professional pundits have been asking the wrong question.

A proper leftist party platform

Via Harry's Place comes the platform of the Program of People's Unity Electoral List (the Iraqi Communist Party and friends).
Remember when leftists used to believe in this stuff?  When did "the Left" stop believing?

Jewish history

Another one via Normblog... Jewish history.  Samples:

June 30, 3988 BCE: The Paleolithic period ends. The Jews are blamed.

January 1, 1: Yoshke the Elder inadvertently sparks a philosophical crisis when he asks a Roman tax official: "What was yesterday's date?"

March 23, 1128: Shmuel "Schmaltzy" Schnitzel, the greatest kosher chef of his time, is born in Frankfurt, where he invents the frankfurter. Later he moves to Hamburg, where he invents the hamburger. At the height of his career he moves to Worms, where, inexplicably, he can't get a job.

Go read.

Bringing new meaning to the word "democracy"

One of the hopeful signs from the Middle East has been Ghaddafi's son's proclamation that the future lies with democracy.
Michael Totten, who took this at face value initially, now explains what Ghaddafian "democracy" really means.
Feh.
Hint: it's a step beyond Saddam's old method for getting 99+% of the vote.  It's positively breathtaking in its, er, subtlety. It completely eliminates the problems we have here with recounts, challenges, and arguments over who really has a mandate.
Go read.