Why not? They did a fine job, and got some help at the end.

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I've always wished that Christopher Buckley would write more in his own voice, rather than in the comic style he uses to such great effect.

It isn't as good as I anticipated; it's even better. Thank you, Christopher. Thank you, National Review. Thank you, Vodkapundit.

Image via National Review, in the Christopher Buckley story linked above, "My Old Man and the Sea."

And thank you, William F. Buckley, Jr. Godspeed.

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. . . that gin is supposedly bad for the eyesight. And something inside me died.

How is a girl supposed to choose between her two truest loves? She cannot, of course:

Sonnet XXV

That Love at length should find me out and bring

This fierce and trivial brow into the dust

Is, after all, I must confess, but just;

There is a subtle beauty in the thing,

A wry perfection; wherefore now let sing

All voices how into my heart was thrust,

Unwelcome as Death's own, Love's bitter crust,

All criers proclaim it, and all steeples ring.

This being done, there let the matter rest;

What more remains is neither here nor there.

That you requite me not is plain to see;

Myself your slave herein have I confessed.

Thus far, indeed, the world may mock at me,

But if I suffer, it is my own affair.

I weigh the matter out in my mind: my livelihood, or gin? Cannot one have both, with judicious applications of raw carrots and Bausch & Lomb vitamins?*

I decide that Edna St. Vincent Millay was not simply pathological, but clinical, and mentally prescribe her some antidepressants.

And yet I am not yet at ease. I come home, and see that my roommate has brought some cake back from an AA meeting. I cut myself a slice, and discover that the local bakery whose name adorns the box did not use Miracle Whip in the frosting. Oh, no.

But how can I be sure? I make sure. Two slices later, I sit down, open up my book, and make myself a classic Martini.

Very dry. With an olive.

There is a subtle beauty in the thing,
A wry perfection.

Within a week I expect to be in double-escrow: as a seller, and as a buyer.

* No. I do not take them. But only because (1) I can't afford them; (2) if my father caught me taking vitamins, he'd kill me, because he has decided that all supplements are a racket. [The dad and nuance are not the best of friends.] (3) My rather wistful desire to never lose my eyesight is related to my rather wistful desire to never lose my teeth, which is in turn related to my rather wistful urge never to die. If I were to be caught taking vitamins and killed by my dad, that would rather pervert the whole project, no?

Instead, I'm taking Braille classes, memorizing my favorite poems, and buying books on CD. I am not, after all, stupid.

I may learn sign language, just to hedge my bets.

* * Whaaaaaaaaat?

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Helps Michelle Obama out:

“[I]n this ever-shifting, moving bar, Barack Obama will always be the underdog. No matter how much money he raises, no matter how many wins he pulls together, no matter how many delegates he accumulates; he is still the underdog. It’s the way it works.”

Honey, your husband is damn near a lock for the nomination for President of a very major political party. Get over yourself, already.

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Glenn's new camera hasn't just overcome time and space—but any objections!

The entire thing is here, and it looks pretty accurate (others from Harvey in Wiki appear off by a word or two—and the punctuation leaves a bit to be desired.)

Oh, yes! Yes. Yes—these things always work out just the way Harvey says they will. He is very, very versatile. Did I tell you he could stop clocks? Well, you've heard the expression 'his face would stop a clock'? Well, Harvey can look at your clock and stop it. And you can go anywhere you like—with anyone you like—and stay as long as you like. And when you get back, not one minute will have ticked by . . . You see, science has overcome time and space. Well, Harvey has overcome not only time and space, but any objections.

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"What, because of your walk yesterday? Aren't you used to that one?"

"I thought I was," I told him. "But apparently I hadn't been out on the hills in months. I just remembered that I should take advantage of 'em, since we'll be out of here in June."

"Well, we'll be closer to Griffith Park, then," he remarked. "You might find a trail up there that you'll like even more."

"I'm, like paralyzed. Don't you have any stretches I should do? How could three and a half miles do this to me, even with the incline?"

"You want my advice?" he asks.

"Of course I want your advice. You're a coach. Help me. I won't be able to take the stairs normally for, like, two days."

"Ice your legs," he suggests.

"I can't understand you when you use those big words," I tell him. "What is this, an SAT-preparation course? You're supposed to be helping me."

"It's a small word. There are only three letters in it. And they are little letters."

"Yes." I flounce out of his office, calling over my shoulder, "and, by the way: it's a noun. You're using it as a verb. But I don't know what you're talking about. La la la la la!"

And then I look at the staircase. I bite my lip, and I step.

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(Via Eric at Classical Values, who has a few more details about this walkway in Spain; hop over there for a bit of background, but please mind your footing.)

I'm the caves/enclosed places/feeling of entrapment or engulfment -phobic person. Not heights; not generally. (I was afraid for a moment that the person with the "helmet cam" was going to go into the passageway within the mountain, and that might have upset me. But she or he didn't, and all was well.)

Still, I don't quite get this. If we can maintain the paths that go up to Yosemite Falls or Half Dome, why can't the Spaniards just fix this?

I mean, I hate to sound like a Gringo—and I hate to upset Jonah Goldberg and go all fascist/CCC—but just fix it. I mean, well-maintained hiking trails are a goddamned human right. Sort of.

(Sorry. My brain isn't functioning well. I might be having a statist moment; I get that way in Tijuana, when I see the gaping, dangerous holes in the sidewalk, and wonder why they can't just charge some taxes to the people who sell me my cappuccino, cigars, and tortilla soup, and fix the fucking sidewalks with it. I mean, how many stupid college kids go down there for spring break, get loaded, and bust their freakin' ankles? Fix the sidewalks! Fix the walkways! Fix the trails! Just fix it!

Sorry. I think I'm done.)

Of course, it's easy to die in Yosemite; the code words are granite, water, and wildlife. Ultimately, one has to have some respect for Mother Nature. For gravity. For slippery surfaces. For human fragility. And for oneself.

I climbed those same cables up to Half Dome as a child. But it was hard. And I was concentrating; not laughing.

I don't want to blame the victim, but that's part of the secret, I think.

But Spain should fix their fucking trail; did I say that?

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But fuck China.

I mean, China (the country, distinct from its government) has provided the cultural backbone of this whole house: our T'ai Chi. Our seeking after the optimal Feng Shui. Our red door. Our dragon sculpture. Even some of the southeastern Asian influences bear China's bloody imprint (and some of my favorite artifacts betray the equally murderous Japanese one; we have not talked with our Korean landscaper about how much Japanese influence went into the bonsai garden, for example).

But at this particular point in time, a grand country and its traditions&make that three grand countries, and any number of grand traditions—are being held at gunpoint by a bunch of psuedo-Marxist, quasi-Capitalist, athiestic, ugly thugs.

I wish I lived in the Bay Area. (That is something I've said more than once, but not in a long time.)

And—oh, yeah—fuck China.

By the way, Google: try not to be too evil, mkay? Or it'll be time to say "f--- you" to you, too.

And: China sucks. (And I don't mean in the way that Primus sucks. I mean, it sucks.)

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I'm sorry any of us Westerners ever suggested that the "religion of peace" has adherents that do not live up to that slogan.

I see that I was quite wrong about that.

I won't let it happen again.

(Via Memeorandum.)

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was just a piece of fabric. It turns out it's something more delicate than that: gossamer-thin. Not strong, like silk. More . . . organic. Not sturdy, like wool.

I wish we'd stop making Old Glory out of toilet paper. I really would. What on Earth was Betsy Ross thinking, setting a precedent like that?

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has some kind of paid writing gig, the filthy whore. I didn't know those were even still out there:

Okay, I completed the first five paragraphs of my "real writing" assignment, so now it's time to goof off some more by reading Little Miss Atilla's suggestion to stressed-out, overweight bloggers:

Hint: have your readers send you gin, instead of snacks. That'll help.

Easy on the gin, Sweetheart. We know what happens when you get into the gin. If only we had pictures . . .

Speaking of pictures, Fausta has pictures of stressed-out bloggers living it up at a blog conference in New Jersey. OK, maybe they weren't "living it up." It's New Jersey, after all.

Just because you don't have pictures doesn't mean they don't exist, Robert Stacy. In point of fact, there are pictures of Mrs. Goldstein and me talking about good, old-fashioned feminism in Santa Barbara at the YAF Conference. I believe after my second dirty martini I uttered the phrase "forty-nine-percent majority" in reference to those of the dude-ish persuasion, and Ace of Spades has never let me forget that one. But why was he eavesdropping on girl talk, anyway?

Oh, and here—for everyone else—is the link to Fausta's blog, and the pix from the aforementioned East Coast blogstravaganza. (Body count: zero. Extraordinary, no?)

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Give peace a chance.

Such as it is, of course.

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He's running a nice little primer on disaster preparedness—including how to cope in the coming Zombie Wars; truth be told, Glenn links a lot of this stuff; so it's probably worth doing a search on disaster and survival over at his blog if you get deeper in.

The one caution I would have is that on the West Coast the biggest thing that happens to the average family is an earthquake, for which there is never any warning. (Those who tell you there is such a thing as "earthquake weather" got the idea from Elvis, who shows up for Sunday dinner around their tables now and then, and asks for a peanut butter sandwich.)

And the second/third biggest concerns are fires and floods, for which the "bugout bag" is a good idea—but so are such things as sandbags, fire-retardant landscaping, and the conventional wisdom that you don't "pre-soak" the roof (the water will just evaporate). We've gone so far as to pack up all the non-digital photos and my good jewelry, and had 'em ready to load into the car with the usual duffel bags full of change of clothes, canned food, medicines, and the like.

The point is, regional variations are important when you're making emergency-preparedness plans: the East Coast and Midwestern guides don't always suit my needs, because we just do not have storms here. Not as people in other states understand the term. (Don't get me wrong: we respect water in SoCal, but part of the reason is that this house is built on a hillside; the rest has to do with the common one-two punch of heavy rains and windstorms. We've lost a lot of trees on this property when the soil is saturated and the wind starts blowing heavy timber down at 70 mph or better. That's always fun.)

Of course, riots do fit the profile of East Coast/Midwestern storms in terms of the fact that there is generally some warning before there's a riot. But why, oh why, wouldn't you have as much canned food and water on hand as possible, along with a little camp stove to place on the balcony and cook up whatever is about to go bad in the freezer when the power goes out? It's horrible to go to the store when everyone else is doing it, unless you're making one last run for fresh produce.

And I do imagine that the guidelines for fighting zombies will be similar all around the country; that part shouldn't change from region to region.

By the way—anyone want some 55-gallon water drums? We won't be able to fit them into the new condo.

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. . . is taking his dollies and going home.

Et tu, Reason?

Well, I oughtn't to complain: this is part of the danger, with Maverick-Man. I was tempted to stay home as well.

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You have to call in the middle of the night to get her attention. (Both the latest Hillary ad and John McCain's response are at the link; video wars, indeed.)

Mark Steyn, writing in the OC Register:

Jeepers, will all business during this Clinton administration be transacted at 3 a.m.? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sen. Clinton was the establishment candidate running in a party addicted to novelty (in candidates, that is; its policies remain mired in the 1960s). Hill calculated that, given the Dems' deference to identity politics, her gender would give her enough novelty to sail through. But Obama trumped that, and now it's eternally three in the morning, and the phone doesn't stop not ringing. She's like Frank Sinatra in Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's all-time great saloon song:

"It's quarter to three
There's no one in the place except you and me Â… "

Superdelegate Jon Corzine, governor of New Jersey and an early supporter of Hillary, now says that if she doesn't win the overall primary popular vote he'll switch to Obama. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont says she needs to throw in the towel for the good of the party.

"Well, that's how it goes
And Joe, I know you're getting anxious to close Â… "

They're locking up the joint, and no matter how many nickels she drops in the jukebox it won't play "Hail to the Chief."

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You were nothing short of amazing. As a fan of (certain select) movies, I bow to you—and as an advocate of gun rights I take my hat off to your service for all these many years.

I get it, Dear: you would rather have been spending time with your grandkids, rather than fighting the good fight at the NRA. But you did the right thing, setting yourself up for ridicule from your erstwhile colleagues; and we deeply appreciate it. We have for years. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And now, Paul Rugg, John McCann, and Tom Ruegger would like to make fun of you one more time. (I've alway suspected that the main point of "The Huntsman" was to give the guy doing Heston's voice the chance to say "darn the luck!" It's also fun that the Huntsman themes are invariably longer than the sequences they actually introduce.)

Of course, Ruegger, Rugg, and McCann did it with love; that makes all the difference, no?

UPDATE: Hackbarth has a Heston roundup over at The American Mind.

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So, here you go:

there's also a kind of pandering in what Obama is doing. A few years ago, a pair of political scientists, John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, looked at evidence from surveys and focus groups and drew some fairly startling conclusions. Most Americans, they found, think there are easy, straightforward solutions out there that everyone would agree on if only biased special interests and self-serving politicians would get out of the way. They want to be governed by ENSIDs: empathetic non-self-interested decision makers.

This is pure fantasy, of course. But indulging it is Obama's stock-in-trade.

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And—unlike those whose blogs are actually read—I'm not even getting paid. That's double the oppression, in my book.

Stacy gets a kick out of the capitalistic exploitation suffered by us poor beleaguered information workers (and they are especially concerned about us at The New York Times, which is bleeding jobs because of New Media):

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Karl at Protein Wisdom is concerned about the reports of weight gain among bloggers. (Hint: have your readers send you gin, instead of snacks. That'll help.)

I'm gonna die laughing . . . Or, die blogging. Definitely the way to go—with a smile on my face.

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Matt Vadum, writing at the CRC blog, discusses Gore's new ad campaign to share his environmental concerns, which of course many people feel have veered over into "Chicken Little" territory.

An article in The Politico says GoreÂ’s Alliance for Climate Protection is producing a TV commercial featuring Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton

sitting on a couch on the beach. In the ad . . . they say that while they may not agree on many things, they do agree that they have to work to save the planet.

A future couple in the “strange bedfellows” or “unlikely alliances” spots will be recorded soon: Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Does $300 million sound like a lot of money? It does, except when you consider how much more Gore stands to personally profit from the climate of mass hysteria heÂ’s been been helping to create with a no-holds-barred campaign of misinformation aimed at marginalizing and ostracizing all those who dare to question his take on global warming.

As we reported in the August 2007 issue of Foundation Watch (”Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It,” by Deborah Corey Barnes), with help from friends at Goldman Sachs, including Hank Paulson, the investment bank’s former CEO who is now the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Gore has established a network of organizations to promote the so-called climate crisis and keep himself in the spotlight.

Gore himself is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies
that are going green. GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

If carbon emissions trading ever comes to the United States, Al Gore will be uniquely positioned to cash in. As a politician, Gore speaks warmly of transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming. Little is known about his shadowy firmÂ’s finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports.

Richard Campbell, a spokesman for Generation Investment Management, is apparently referring to Matt's charges as a “nonsense story.”

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he claims that neither Mr. Gore nor any other members of the investment company’s board will make money from the expansion of carbon trading: "To suggest then that they are somehow benefiting from the growth of this industry betrays a complete lack of knowledge of the carbon offset industry.”

Well, of course: Vadum didn't say they are benefiting now, in real time. He wondered whether they might in the future.

All I know is that Gore has a hammer—of sorts—and it looks like most of the most pressing problems in the country and on the globe are starting to resemble nails.

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Still: this seems a bit brief for dual-participant session.

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1 Whoever was responsible for the notion of intercourse normally taking upwards of twenty minutes scored a major propaganda coup. Since anybody challenging this figure has to rely mainly on personal experience, to disagree is to claim that one does not measure up. So nobody challenges something that may not be true. The real question is how often women are left hanging, so to speak, after the man is done.

Posted by: John at April 04, 2008 04:27 PM (q0qzQ)

2 What passes for science in some circles these days. What? You people got something in the microwave? Relax and enjoy every single second...until they turn into hours. Can't you think up a second and third act for your play?

Posted by: Darrell at April 04, 2008 06:11 PM (Jlw8J)

3 John--If you take care of the woman first, you won't have to worry . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 05, 2008 12:17 PM (Hgnbj)

4 AG, yes, I know, if the lady I'm with is happy, then everyone's happy.

Posted by: John at April 05, 2008 05:22 PM (hdvAx)

5 Well, yes. [Actually, I meant that if you get the more challenging aspect of the project over with, conditions become right to achieve the more straightforward goals. But YMMV . . .]

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 05, 2008 05:44 PM (Hgnbj)

6 Wow, cool man, big thanks! http://xsncjxisfdcjx.com

Posted by: yjyvowlvxu at April 24, 2008 01:05 PM (OKGFw)

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