Torture who gone what now?

Speaking as a liberal, Maureen Dowd sucks. Her commentary is as saccharine as it is insipid, spawning half-assed arguments that begin with outrage and meander along, proving nothing before ending off with a parting salvo that usually resembles moral indignation.

General structure:
A) I can't believe the Bush administration did _____ [I usually agree with her here]
B) Rather than develop an argument against _____, I'll restate my anger with synonyms, off-point metaphors and some patent fire and brimstone.
C) Running out of space, I'll just state, again--for the record--that George W. Bush is ruining the country.

It's crap, really, and her latest piece is maybe the worst written thing I've read since last I drafted a blog. Ben postulates that she's the liberal Ann Coulter, and I suspect he may be right. They both whine and rant and posture to hide hollow arguments.

The monetary value of guilt

Thanks to the eagerness of my University's student loans office, and the laxness of requirements for deferment put forth by that avaricious Pennsylvanian leviathan, I'm clear of debt for a time. Say what you must about the anachronisms of modern Catholicism--about the anti-Semitism that facilitated the Holocaust's terrible lapse of conscience and the second-class treatment of homosexuals and women today--it's nice that they're still given to a medieval unease when it comes to usury.

Genderizing your blog

Worried you come across as a priss in your blogs? As a heterosexual male constantly mistaken as being a faggot or one of them homos--depending on the company--you can bet I do. Meet the Gender Genie. The tricky little app, when given a string of text, makes an educated guess about the author's possession or lack of a penis. The methodology, in my opinion, is highly suspect, but I was delighted to find that impersonating a fiery evangelical garnered my manliest score ever [roughly 72%]. When you compare that with my average of right around 50%, or total gender ambiguity, it feels significant.

I found the link on a really post at overstated, which means the link itself must be old. Old, in blog terms, equals death. I'm sorry if I've wasted your time.

UPDATE: This post here is a bodice-ripping 89% masculine. That's hot.

Multifunction

Drumming eases tension, cures cancer, makes you smarter, says the Percussion Marketting Council.

Holy shit, there's a council dedicated to marketing percussion.

Parting salvo

Conservative Opinionist William Saffire is hanging up his gilded quill and inks. Upon departure, he's left us with a guide for reading opinion pieces.

It's funny.

The legacy of Scopes' monkey

Good little opinion piece about the anti-evolution push and how Scopes didn't end creationism as many thought, but fueled the fire and created divisive splintering where an uneasy peace might have taken root. I know I'm beating a dead horse because my hand's getting sore, but metaphysical speculation is not science, and refuting theory A is not sufficient proof of theory B. In case you'd forgotten, I don't hold these people in high esteem.

A person once gave me a view of the Bible and of religion in general that speaks not only to the academic turmoil caused by Creation Science, but to the human tragedies of genocide and holy war caused by the same mindset. He said, "The Bible tells you how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go." Lacking this insight, literalism breeds narrow-mindedness, which breeds intolerance, which breeds conflicts that--by definition--offer no hope of resolution, which, eventually, breed death. And, unfortunately, in those major world religions where fundamentalism is so prevalent, a divine mandate of in-kind retribution, read literally, ensures that death will always breed more death.

This isn't just about Science books.

For clarity, the author might want to avoid using idioms from foreign languages when perfectly suitable English expressions exist in the future. And French no less, tsk. My favorite is theocrats manqués, which not even google has a clue about]

Landmark of Democracy

Voting crisis or no, the close gubernatorial election has yielded women in Washington's three highest offices, Governor and the two senatorial positions. This, according to FMF, is the first time ever such state offices have been concurrently held by women.

So that's nice as a thing for women, but I'm not a woman. What I'm more glad about is that these three women were far and away the best candidates for their positions. Dino Rossi made himself a few million dollars in real estate, made himself an enemy of women and homosexuals, with one of the most stringently fundamentalist voting records in the state legislature, then marketed himself as a moderate with a 'social conscience'. George Nethercutt, whom Patty Murray soundly defeated, is a firebrand and a moron who openly mocked the sacrifice of our troops in Iraq. He was a bad congressman who would have made a really bad senator.

Washington ranks second behind Maryland for percentage of female legislators.

Droog repellent

The Underground is going to be filled with "uncool" music to drive away punk-ass kids.

Tube bosses intend to use recordings of Pavarotti recitals, Vivaldi and Mozart in a battle against anti-social behaviour at 35 stations on the District, East London, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines.

In Hammersmith, Vivaldi will play up to a block away from the station, gradually giving way to The Clash, which will draw the ruffians like catnip into an old-fashioned police smash up. The original plan, which called also for the stylings of one Ludwig Van, was amended after his 5th tended to cause violent nausea and suicide in the ultra-violent.

The Guardian via Fark

Wiggle room

As per previous discussion, it looks like the Baptists--the most wash-inclined of all protestants--have adopted a policy of non-aggression as pertains the gay and lesbian community. The new suggestion from some kind of 'task force' read something like this:

Faggerts is still gross an' dang'rous, but we won't excommyoonicat'chee if they's worked they's spells on'ee.

They need all that tithe money after all. Pragmatism and greed, if nothing else, will topple prejudice in the end. Amen.

View from the top

Recently I became aware of a plateau achieved by this little blog of mine.

We all know of the primacy of Google and the importance placed on that site's page rank. As a small to medium sized blog, my page rank is modest at best, but I nonetheless like to compare myself to other sites. I like it best when I can compare myself favorably to other, larger sites.

For example, Correct My Spelling is the second most popular site to ever misspell Nouveau Riche [The me-preferred neuvo riche being both more economical and less vowel-intensive].

And, when searching [perhaps only in Belgium] for commentary on the truism 'without trust there can be no love'--a sentiment I, perhaps naively, thought I'd actually made up--CMS ranks a lackluster 4th, but that is exactly one ahead of theWB.com message boards. I consider this a major coup because who knows more about trust and love than preteen hicks and disillusioned widowers?

But recently, CMS has catapulted to the top of some rather disturbing lists. Tawdry lists is perhaps the sentiment I'm looking for; lists that I wouldn't consider to be representative of what Correct My Spelling has sought to achieve in this global idea exchange.

CMS is now number one with a bullet in each of the following Google Search Strings:

preteen genitalia [Mike discovered this one. He also lives near an Elementary School]

going condomless blogs -gay

Even though I didn't seek out this demographic of pedophiles and homophobes who go in for risky sex, I may now change focus. It's never really been about what I say as much as how many people read it.

The Bard had The Crud

Shakespeare had syphilis, said immunologists who, for some reason, weren't working on curing HIV, Hanta, or one of the other thousands of here-to-fore incurable things that slay people daily, but rather speculating about a 500-year-old case of VD.