Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Good Night
But that's in the future. Now is now. So merry Christmas, all. Safe travels.
Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.
Live Monkey ShowSeems the people at Church Sign Generator are too clever for me. Still, click over and design your own cheeky church signs.
Tickets $7
No Outside Food
The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders' commitment to privacy rights.Clearly, this is John Ashcroft's fault.
"The monkeys also recently typed out a Thomas Pynchon novel, but that doesn't count."One is apparently now a popular blogger. (Possibly Airdog?)
Sunday, December 19 ... (because it's a Sunday)One out of every three days, Mass attendance is mandatory. This, I assume, is why they call it "the most wonderful time of the year".
Saturday, December 25 ... (because it's Christmas)
Sunday, December 26 ... (because it's a Sunday)
Saturday, January 1 ... (because it's the Feast of Mary, Mother of God)
Sunday, January 2 ... (because it's a Sunday)
I've called Andrew Sullivan "excitable," but [Juan] Cole makes Sullivan look like Brian Lamb.Not necessarily free-standingly funny, except when you consider that Brian Lamb is inherently hilarious. He's like a mustachioed man in drag that way. (And, I assume, in no other.) The ultimate straight-man of politics.
You Are a Retrospective Soul |
The most misunderstood of all the soul signs. Sometimes you even have difficulty seeing yourself as who you are. You are intense and desire perfection in every facet of your life. You're best described as extremely idealistic, hardworking, and a survivor. Great moments of insight and sensitivity come to you easily. But if you aren't careful, you'll ignore these moments and repeat past mistakes. For you, it is difficult to seperate the past from the present. You will suceed once you overcome the disappoinments in life. Souls you are most compatible with: Traveler Soul and Prophet Soul |
The Great Crusade: VictoryThis is just a rough plot sketch; there'd obviously have to be a lot of fleshing out of the characters and their relationships, or the picture would just be a massive self-important spectacle. But that ain't my gig: I'm just the idea man.
The movie follows groups of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and the British XXX Corps through the last year of the war. It opens with the Anglo-American victory at Arnhem in the Netherlands. With Allied forces on the German side of the Rhine, Eisenhower accedes to his subordinate Montgomery: the British Field Marshal will form a massive force to push across the North German Plain in a drive to Berlin and the Nazi leadership. The army moves into Germany facing little resistance until counterattacked by a massive German army at Minden on the Weser River. The Allies face almost certain defeat until saved by the last-minute arrival of Patton's 3rd Army. The Allies push on into Berlin, which they take at enormous cost, in late autumn 1944. The movie ends with the German High Command's surrender, and scenes of rejoicing in the streets of American cities as FDR declares "Victory in Europe".
The Great Crusade: Rising
The movie opens in February 1945 with the American protagonists from Victory in the PX of their camp in Kassel. They're now part of an occupation force, working to rebuild a shattered Germany, but they fear they'll soon be redeployed to the Pacific to fight on the Empire of Japan. A scrambled signal comes on the radio: it's former SS Obergruppenfuhrer Ernst Kalternbrunner, proclaiming "armed resistance against the Anglo-Saxon powers" as "the sacred duty of all true Germans". The men dismiss this as nothing more than bravado, until the next day the American HQ in Heidelberg is wiped out in a car-bomb attack.* We watch the SS insurgency grow, hundreds of thousands strong. There are daily bombings and shootings. Eisenhower is assassinated. Much of Bavaria becomes a "no-go" zone for Allied soldiers. Desperate for manpower, the United States stalls its efforts in the Pacific to redeploy tens of thousands of Marines are redeployed to Europe. As the situation grows more dire, new American president Truman comes under fire from domestic critics, lead by Charles Lindbergh and John Dos Passos, blast the Administration for its apparent lack of a plan "to win the peace in Europe". In mid-August, as the president contemplates an attack on the insurgent-held city of Nuremburg, ominous news arrives: a squadron of B-29s has been shot down over Japan, apparently by experimental Japanese jet-fighters flying more than 200 kph faster than their fastest American counterparts. The Allies have no defense against such superweapons; the plan to bomb Japan into submission from the air must be called off. The film climaxes with the American assault on Nuremburg, which retakes the city but fails to capture Kaltenbrunner or most of the insurgents, who melt into the civilian population. It ends on a still darker note: the launch of a fleet of Japanese intercontinental bombers, headed for the West Coast, armed with the biological weapons developed by the secretive Unit 731: bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhoid.
The Great Crusade: Operation Arrow
The film opens in a civil defense facility outside of San Francisco. Japanese bombers are spotted on the radar; scrambled fighters are unable to down any. Curiously, no damage is reported in the city; the Japanese mission appears to have failed. In Germany, an officer with the 394th Regiment Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon (introduced as a minor character in Rising) begins to suspect that the SS insurgency is being aided by communist infiltrators from Soviet-occupied Slovakia and Poland. He attempts to warn his superiors of the plan he believes he's discovered - a Soviet scheme to assassinate a visiting Churchill - but is blocked. The Western powers must maintain good relations with the Soviets, who are fighting in Korea to establish a launching point for Operation: Arrow, the combined English-Russian-American amphibious invasion of Japan. Shortly before our heroes board the Trans-Siberian Railroad, bound for Vladivostok and the Japanese front, they learn the horrible news: massive outbreaks of plague and anthrax on the West Coast, millions dead and dying, with the Japanese claiming responsibility. The movie's final hour covers Operation: Arrow itself, a massive and bloody effort five times larger than D-Day, in which all the major characters from the trilogy are killed.
Faris-Cifelli and her husband are full of ideas of how to spend their new fortune: 140 annual scholarships named after abandoned babies, more efforts to educate the public, and possibly a shelter for pregnant teens.News to be happy by.
Last week she [Britney Spears] was joined by the Hollywood starlet Lindsay Lohan, 18, who said in a magazine interview that she wanted to marry very soon. “I want to be a young mom,” she said. “It’s better, healthier and more fun for the baby. My generation can afford it, whether our parents agree or not.”Hey Lins, you've still got my number, right?
EU upholds laser tag banSo, for those keeping score at home: laser tag - an affront to human dignity; involuntary euthanasia of infants - peachy keen.
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Union's top court has backed a German ban on laser tag games in which players simulate killing each other in a maze.
"The affront to human dignity posed by that activity justifies a restriction on the freedom to provide services," the European Court of Justice ruled.
Police in the German city of Bonn in 1994 had prohibited a German company, Omega Spielhallen- und Automatenaustellungs-GmbH, from operating a Laserdrome, a game developed and marketed by a British supplier.
German authorities argued that "acts of simulated homicide and the ensuing trivialization of violence" violated the principle of human dignity enshrined in the German constitution.
The owners appealed to Germany's federal administrative court, which sought a ruling from the European court in Luxembourg as to whether the ban contravened the freedom to provide services under EU law.
The court ruled that such bans "are not excluded" in Germany simply because another EU country, in this case Britain, allows the game.
Christmas, according to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1999, is when those in that particular faith tradition celebrate "the birth of a homeless child." Or, as Al Gore put it in 1997, "Two thousand years ago, a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child." For Pete's sake, they weren't homeless — they couldn't get a hotel room. They had to sleep in the stable only because Dad had to schlep halfway across the country to pay his taxes in the town of his birth, which sounds like the kind of cockamamie bureaucratic nightmare only a blue state could cook up. Except that in Massachusetts, it's no doubt illegal to rent out your stable without applying for a Livestock Shelter Change of Use Permit plus a Temporary Maternity Ward for Non-Insured Transients License, so Mary would have been giving birth under a bridge on I-95.Emphasis added. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but it's my blog and my birthday, so Nyah-nyah.
Thirty days hath September,All that was once true. But now, when - through the magic of monkeying with the Blogger time-stamp - I have made of November a thirty-first day. COWER IN FEAR! before my awesome time-altering abilities!
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except for February, which is the freak month.