Aliens

The Drunkablog had no idea at the time, but Billy Bob, not often a trendsetter in the dog world, had canine flu back in August. At least, he was sneezing a lot and his little (well, big) nose seemed irritated. It was one of those, "if he's not better in a day or two I'll take him to the vet," deals, but he was. Better, I mean.

Tried to find a picture of the idiot looking sick or at least pensive to go with this story, but no luck. This was as close as I could get:


His tail has been captured by a tractor beam. Close enough.

Delay: Singing the blues?

What's all this I hear about Tom Delay being indicted by Ronnie Earl?

Earl's a hell of a blues-personage, but I'm almost sure he's not a lawyer, let alone a district attorney.

Oh. Never mind.

Ho-quo demands attention

Randolph hurrried to tell his mother what he had heard about Gilbert's loss of employment. He knew well enough her feeling toward his father's ward to feel sure that it would be welcome intelligence.

"Detected in stealing money!" ejaculated Mrs. Briggs, triumphantly. "Just what I predicted all along. I am not often deceived about character."

"I never heard you predict it, mother." said Randolph.

--From Shifting for Himself, (early 20th century according to this site; 1876 according to Alger's entry in the Online Encyclopedia Project).

(Gilbert from the Franklin Institute Online; medium from Cassadagacamp.org; ear trumpet lady from the Horatio Alger, Jr., Digital Repository at Northern Illinois University (which also offers a Horatio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture).

(More ho-quos here, here, here, here and, if you still haven't yarked, here.)

Note to self: Card for Mao or else!

Somehow I missed the 13th anniversary (the 24th) of Comrade Gonzales' "Speech From The Cage." Very dangerous. If MIM finds out they'll struggle me.

And October 1 is the 56th anniversary of the liberation of China! How could I forget? Cindy and Joel are having a potluck. Guess I'll bring green bean casserole again. I mean, China was re-enslaved by capitalism after Mao died, so no reason to get fancy.

Now that I'm looking there's a ton of MIM holidays coming up: October 15, anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party; November 6, anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; and November 12, Martyrs' Day in Afghanistan (get balloons). Oh no, Stalin's birthday is December 21, and Mao's is December 26, the day after Christmas! I'm sick of the holiday season already.

Update: as part of Drunkablog's effort to become a better "service" blog, here's a link to gifts for that special someone on Mao's birthday!

Update II: Great line in the Stalin birthday page: "Today defending Stalin does not reflect any obsession with any particular detail of history."

Update III: Mark in Mexico says, Happy birthday, China! (via "Free Speech Is Only for Uber-Libs" on this LGF thread.

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Stupidity noticed

The Drunkablog recommends for your delectation the September 17 post "Sowell-ed down the river," which for some halfwit lamebrain reason the Drunkablog put back in draft form after he published it. Probably to have the Drunkablog legal team vet it for libel. Anyway, if you haven't yet, check eet out.

Whatever happened to: The Brights?

In the summer of 2003 two philosophers, both atheists, garnered a lot of coverage in the MSM and the blogosphere for their attempt to start a new meme. The word "atheist," they argued, had too many negatives, to borrow the focus group term. They must henceforth and forevermore call themselves, and make others call them, not atheists, but "brights."

The "specialty bulbs" of this meme scheme were Daniel C. Dennett and Richard Dawkins (not to be confused with the similarly named British atheist philosopher Richard Dawson). Dawkins, as Wikipedia notes, is also more or less responsible for the term and concept of the "meme."

So it was the better-known Dawkins who first yanked the basket from over the brights' little domed skulls, in an article for the Grauniad with the strikingly Orwellian lead-in, "Language can help to shape the way we think about the world. Richard Dawkins welcomes an attempt to raise consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations."

The basic tenets of the brights:

A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview.

A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements.

The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview.

And one they forgot:

A bright is smug well past the point of idiocy. Madeline Murray O'Hare, for example, was an early bright. The brights' website urges us to:

Think about your own worldview to decide if it is indeed free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities.

Okay! (Hours pass.) Uh, I'm having a little trouble with the entities, Mr. Bright!

But if none of my barrow-wights bothers you and

If you decide that you fit the definition, then you can simply say so and join with us in this extraordinary effort to change the thinking of society—the Brights Movement.

Oh, goody, you want me to get in people's faces too. Hey, I carpool to Mensa meetings, so I'm used to boasting of how smart I am to perfect strangers! This "brights" meme really will self-propagate!

You stupid . . .

Apparently not. Reaction to the meme was, to say the least, unenthusiastic, even among natural allies of the "brights" like the Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and
Skeptical Inquirer, which in an unintentionally hilarious article said that "what atheists really need is for people to believe that they're likeable, and not so different from everybody else."

Oh, buck up, chappy! As you say, you certainly don't disagree with Dawkins that arguments for atheism are, besides being undeniably correct, inherently rational. It's just that Dawkins' "framing" is wrong. SI continues, "So perhaps future atheist message crusaders should describe themselves and their brethren as humble, rather than angry or sneering or super-smart."

No more acting super-smart? What if it's just what we are? And humble? Dawkins, in particular, doesn't know the meaning of the word. Remember the Guardian's ludicrous campaign to get its readers to write "personally" to Americans and persuade them not to vote for Bush in the last election? The paper got some British celebrities to kick it off in truly "bright" style, with the last letter, you can see, from Dawkins. (But don't deprive yourself of John Le Carre and Antonia Fraser's little love notes. You'll feel like leaving the left all over again.) Here's Dawkins' assay in full:

Dear Americans,

Don't be so ashamed of your president: the majority of you didn't vote for him. If Bush is finally elected properly, that will be the time for Americans travelling abroad to simulate a Canadian accent. Please don't let it come to that. Vote against Bin Laden's dream candidate. Vote to send Bush packing.

Before 9/11 gave him his big break - the neo-cons' Pearl Harbor - Bush was written off as an amiable idiot, certain to serve only one term. An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and vindictive; and the thuggish ideologues who surround him are dangerous. 9/11 gave America a free gift of goodwill, and it poured in from all around the world. Bush took it as a free gift to the warmongers of his party, a licence to attack an irrelevant country which, however nasty its dictator, had no connection with 9/11. The consequence is that all the worldwide goodwill has vanished. Bush's America is on the way to becoming a pariah state. And Bush's Iraq has become a beacon for terrorists.

In the service of his long-planned war (with its catastrophically unplanned aftermath), Bush not only lied about Iraq being the "enemy" who had attacked the twin towers. With the connivance of the toadying Tony Blair and the spineless Colin Powell, he lied to Congress and the world about weapons of mass destruction. He is now brazenly lying to the American electorate about how "well" things are going under the puppet government. By comparison with this cynical mendacity, the worst that can be said about John Kerry is that he sometimes changes his mind. Well, wouldn't you change your mind if you discovered that the major premise on which you had been persuaded to vote for war was a big fat lie?

Now that all other justifications for the war are known to be lies, the warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly repeated: the world is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is. But that's the Tony Martin school of foreign policy [Martin was a householder who shot dead a burglar who had broken into his house in 1999]. It's not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave. The world would be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn't justify an assassination attempt. The proper way to get rid of that smirking gunslinger is to vote him out.

As the bumper stickers put it, "Re-defeat Bush". But, this time, do it so overwhelmingly that neither his brother's friends in Florida nor his father's friends on the Supreme Court will be able to rig the count. Decent Americans - there are absolutely more intelligent, educated, civilised, cultivated, compassionate people in America than in any other country in the western world - please show your electoral muscle this time around. We in the rest of the world, who sadly cannot vote in the one election that really affects our future, are depending on you. Please don't let us down.

Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University. More letters to Clark County will be appearing in G2 over the next fortnight.

Professor of the public understanding of science. This little screed raises the suspicion that a guy so willing to throttle the truth is probably untrustworthy in an all 'round sort of way, his take on science included.

Oh, so what happened to the "brights?" Well, nothing. The meme failed utterly, except among the kind of people you try to avoid being cornered by at parties.

Fun with Spoonerisms

Hurry and check out Drudge's headline for Cynthia Kerr's piece on Mother Sheehan's arrest in D.C. today. It'll probably be gone soon: "Cindy Sheehan arrested at White House in cunning stunt."

Real mature, Drudge.

Update 5:15 pm: The headline, she gone. Story now headlined, "Cindy arrested at White House." Did anyone get a screen shot? The Drunkablog didn't because the Drunkablog is a stupe.

Update II: No screenshot yet, but commenters Friarstale and gus3 at LGF noticed.

I-80 idols

Anyone who's driven cross-country on I-80 has seen this abandoned church:


And this abandoned motel:



But it's kind of a pain (and probably illegal) to get back to them, so I don't think tons of people do. They're pretty cool, though. The motel, for example, had tepees for its guests:


AC, HBO and Army blankets smeared with fake smallpox for that true Native American experience!

And the church had--well, it was kinda weird:


Ohhhh-kay: Bingo night, or Mammon-worship?

Surprisingly, the organ was still there:

Couldn't play much on it, though.
Update: Man, it's gonna take a long time to post every picture I've ever taken. But I swore an oath to myself and I'm going to keep it.

Fisk me, you fool: NPR on the anti-war protest in Washington

Libby Lewis had a piece on yesterday's D.C. anti-war protest for NPR this morning, and she was spinning like a dervish. Think I'll take a shot at, well, you know, fisking it. (No cool guy uses that term anymore probably, huh? Well, I still like it.) So here's her whole report, with D-blog interjections (in italics) both amusing and well worth serious thought. Swear to God.

[Lee Ann Hanson]: In cities across the country and around the world yesterday, demonstrators turned out to protest the war in Iraq. A rally in Washington, D.C. drew tens of thousands of people. NPR's Libby Lewis reports.

Okay, you know Lee Ann Hanson's voice, right? It's wonderful--warm, wry, concerned--an instrument she is extremely skilled at using. So already this sounds like the most important thing in the world. Libby begins:

The march drew grandmothers from Michigan, students from New York, and survivors from Katrina. [We all know what she's doing here, of course (scroll down to "Another Update.")] And it drew a number of friends and family of people serving in the military.

Larry Severson [all names are approximate] came from Richmond, Virginia. He's 56 and an environmental engineer. Three of his sons have served in Iraq. "So, people can't say I'm not patriotic 'cause I'm out here speaking out against the war when I've had three sons who've served in the Iraq conflict."

His son Bry spent 15 months in Iraq as a gunner with the 1st Armored Division. His father says his son spent time in a locked psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Army Hospital for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even so, he says, the army has postponed his son's discharge. "At the present time he can't be even near weapons, the army doesn't trust him with a weapon. but he's still scheduled to go back to Iraq this winter. It doesn't make any sense to me."

Of course, it doesn't make any sense, period, except as a bad sit-com pilot. But does Libby show any skepticism? Does she check the guy's story? Not that listeners can tell. So we should just trust him, apparently. As Buckwheat used to not say, "Otay!"

Severson's so mad he's joined the anti-war group Military Families Speak Out. "So that's why I have a sign that says 'don't send my son back to Iraq.'

No, really, Libby. You're not going to check his story? And you're not going to give us an idea of what Military Families Speak Out might stand for? Let me help. Michael T. McPhearson, a founder of the group, said last year in a speech at the YWCA of Brooklyn,

There are many themes that bind us together as we gather here today to discuss and share strategies and information in our efforts to spread and forward peace. This panel is bound together by the underlying themes that have created our individual tragedies. Racism, religious animosity, rampant nationalism and basic pursuit and abuse of power push forward and maintain the conflicts in Iraq, Palestine/Israel and caused the September 11 attacks.

Wouldn't want to report on that, right Lib? Might make the group seem "out of the mainstream." Lewis continues:

At a pre-march rally Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who lost her son Casey in Iraq, and who protested at President Bush's ranch in Crawford [we all know how inadequate a description this is of Our Cin, right?], got a celebrity's welcome from the crowd [background whoos and hoos]. Sheehan said she was going to Congress on Monday. [Mother Sheehan]: "And we're gonna say 'shame on you!' Shame on you for givin' him the authority to invade Iraq."

The protesters chanted "peace now" as they passed by the White House. President Bush was in Colorado and Texes watching hurricane relief efforts. There was some good humor at this march. [Look, I watched the whole thing and there was little humor of any kind, let alone "good" humor.] It cropped up in some of the signs. Some chided the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. Amanda Freitag of Culpepper, Virginia, had a sign that read, "Make levees, not war." [I don't ge--oh! Ha ha!]. Claudia Klein of Cincinnati and Will Hawkins of Urbana Illinois, admired that one [Background voices: That's good! I like that!].

The humor mostly vanished as the tens of thousands of marchers passed by a few hundred counter-protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue [italics hers]. They're planning their own demonstration today. Thirty-year-old James Mullin, an emergency medical technician in Trenton, New Jersey, kept shouting at the protesters, "Ten years Marine Corps!" [Mullin]: "But I think that they're dishonoring the people that have died there."

Protester Daniel Kane of Silver Spring, Maryland, faced off against Mullin. He says he respects Mullin's views. He says everyone has the right to speak up for what they believe.

And amazingly, that's it. Lewis ends with a protester whose voice she doesn't play mouthing First Amendment drivel, and she calls it a "faceoff." Hey, I'm convinced! These protesters are so reasonable they're practically dead! We should listen more closely to what they have to say!

Moonbats lay giant egg

Everybody and his dog is going to post (Billy Bob's proofing his piece right now) about the evil and pathetic "anti-war march" in D.C. today. So am I. But the left's utter debacle actually extends back to Thursday, to the start of the C-Span-covered Town Hall Meeting on Poverty, a sort of Democrat kick-off to the march. A few points about that first.

The line-up, as you can see, featured the usual preening idiots plus two from the preening non-idiot category, Hillary and Barack.

But poor Hillary. She had to sit right next to Harry Belafonte through a huge hunk of his standard rant. Somehow though, and incredibly luckily for Hill, the camera seemed to forget she was there while Harry spoke, and showed the two in the same shot at most twice, while keeping tight tight tight on Harry as he said that:

the Democrat Party is "wrecked" and "ravaged";

he was looking for a "second party" because right now there's only one party, and it has only "various grays of difference [sic]";

since the civil rights movement blacks have been "integrating into a burning house";

(except for the first and last quotes this is a paraphrase) "Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet." . . . I'm always in Africa and see America's paws of oppression on every wall. . . . We don't need an independent commission to tell us about the evil Bushies [Hill had announced the "Katrina Commission"]. Halliburton, Davis-Bacon, setting browns against blacks . . . . Let George Bush and the Christian right know that "their legs have been amputated. I rest my case."

Har got a standing O from the audience for this compendium of wisdom, but once again the camera inexplicably didn't show what was happening onstage. Hill truly leads a charmed life.

Brave new commies

So that was fun to watch. Today, though, we were really witnesses to history as the American left finally found its well-earned self-destruction. And the whole world was watching. Well, maybe not. But a few of my favorite moments:

All the speakers who greeted the crowd with the cry, "Comrades!"

Cyn. McKin.

the mega-lies about the size of the crowd while

the crowd drifted away

Rev. Jessie comparing Mother Dimbulb to Harriet Tubman and Helen Keller. "We thank you for being our shining light in the darkness."

Mother Dimbulb

Raging grannies

Brian Becker and the Bushitler helicopters.

Muslims ranting against Israel

Keffiya mania

"The Wall Must Fall"

All the speakers from liberation movements no one's ever heard of

"From the river to the sea"

Muslims ranting against Israel

And my favorite moment:

"Meet at the socialist liberation tent!"

Life can be good.

Update: Via commenter Kilgore Trout at LGF, the Kos Kidz are eating their own heads.

Update II: Protest pics from Reflections of a Libertarian Independent and Instapundit.

Must . . . quit . . . listening . . .

Michael Medved spent the first hour of his radio show yesterday acknowledging (sort of) his listeners' horror at the disastrously passive interview he had with George Galloway Tuesday. He also, of course, got in a lot of punches at Galloway he wouldn't or couldn't get in then.

But on his blog he's much worse. In a post titled "Subhuman Vermin George Galloway," Medved says nothing about his obvious lack of preparation for the little rat bastard, but instead resorts to the kind of language of which Galloway has long been absolute master.

Medved's first sentence: "Treacherous dictator-suck-up George 'Guttersnipe' Galloway oozes into the Medved Show studio (still reeking from the stench of his slime trail, I'm sure) to peddle his villainy and vitriol."

Well, howdy-do to you, too. But too late, Steve (see second update). When Galloway was actually there, you never touched him. And you're pissed about it.

So today, in an apparent effort to sharpen up his debating skills, Medved scheduled a small idiot from the anti-war group Breasts not Bombs (who are going to be at the D.C. protest this weekend) and beat her up. Oh, she deserved it, mainly but not solely for calling herself a "sacred clown," but jeez, Medved, pick on someone your own size.

Redemption? Like he needs it?

But Medved at least has the guts to link to the LGF thread about Galloway's appearance, which is overwhelmingly negative; hell, commenters on his own blog are negative too:

I have never listened to Mr. Medved before so I came in with no prejudices except that I had heard that he was a right wing guy, my kind of guy. What I got was one of the most embarrassing butt kickings I have ever listened to on the radio. I am not sure if Mr Medved was distracted or simply not very intelligent but the Brit cleaned his clock. Mr Medved is certainly not a journalist, and obviously not a brain surgeon, maybe he should stick to reviewing the new Reese Witherspoon movie because his grasp of intelligent discussion is seriously lacking.

Pretty much. But it's up on Medved's site for all to see, unedited.

Irving salutes Wiesenthal

It's so odd. David Irving has a nice respectful little link ("R.I.P.") to a NYT roundup story on the death of Simon Wiesenthal. Right at the top of his page.

A little farther down, though, he links to another piece on Wiesenthal, this one from the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review website. That piece, "Simon Wiesenthal: Fraudulent 'Nazi Hunter'" has subheads like "Nazi agent," "Wrong about Mengele" and "'Commercializing' the Holocaust."

Just Irving's effort at balanced reporting, I guess.

Back from Ho-atus! The Ho-quo!

(More Horatio Alger quotes o' the week here, here, here, und hier.)

IT was Harold's first theft, and he trembled with agitation as he thrust the pocketbook into his pocket. He would have trembled still more if he had known that his mother's confidential maid and seamstress, Felicie Lacouvreur, had seen everything through the crevice formed by the half-open door.

Felicie smiled to herself as she moved noiselessly away from her post of concealment.

"Master Harold is trying a dangerous experiment," she said to herself. "Now he is in my power. He has been insolent to me more than once, as if, forsooth, he were made of superior clay, but Felicie, though only a poor servant, is not, thank Heaven, a thief, as he is." From Luke Walton, or, the Chicago Newsboy (1889).

Credits (now with more semicolons!): Picture of Harold played by a daguerreotype of Alferd Packer from Sangres.com ("For Your Daily Dose of the Wild West"); Harold's mother played by the ever-versatile Mother Watson; really cool sycamore and headstone thing by Dan Ladd; poor molested servant from the Newgate Calendar, part of the wonderful site Ex-classics, which makes available both online and for download, yes, ex-classics in the public domain.

Lump o' Updates: My "research" for this post led me to two cookbooks, Alferd Packer's Wilderness Cookbook, and Alferd Packer's High-Protein Cookbook. In no way does Drunkablog endorse either; the titles are funny, is all. I guess. Neither does he endorse "Amino Power," and the link to it above is not intended as a product placement.

It could be, though. Your product or service in the Ho-quo, where it'll reach thousands of gouged-out eyes every week. Sound good? Contact my outreach manager at the Drunkablog e-mail address that's probably somewhere on this site!

All right already. Jesus.

MSNBC has shown the plane with the wollywog landing gear making a safe landing at least 15 times already, no more than half an hour after it landed.

Update 8:15: 30 times.

Update II: The passengers don't even get to go down the slide.

Update III 10:25: Uncountable thousands of times. Over and over and over and over and over.

Galloway v. Medved

George Galloway on Medved right now: "I have rather better sources of information within the [Iraq] insurgency [than the U.S. or western media]." No doubt.

The little blowhole is quick, all right. He's had Medved back on his heels several times, but his continual claim that Medved has consulted only "Israeli websites" about him instead of reading the Grauniad, etc., is pretty sickening. The grain of truth in it is that Medved, like the Senate panel that questioned Galloway, took him too lightly and wasn't quite ready for Galloway's southpaw style.

Update: Amid the usual facile crap about hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, "rogue states" and the like, Galloway called Medved a "disk jockey."

Update II: Now he just called him "Steve," which is much worse. Slick little freak.

Update III: Hate to say it but Galloway beat 'ol Steve Medved like a busted bongo.

Update IV: Short thread (for LGF) on Galloway and Medved. No one picked up on the "Steve," but most agree Medved lost bad. Galloway's arguments were in no way compelling, of course, but he was ready and Medved wasn't.

Update V: Misnumbered my updates. Fixed now. Yeesh.

All over the place

Feel like I haven't posted in a month. Another tenant rebellion, sad to say, and therefore many emergency meetings of the landlord association (of which the Drunkablog is president) to attend. We were somewhat unprepared, but through earnest negotiations got things under control.

Update: Movie Trivia Time: What seminal fillum are the "rebellion" and "landlord association" frames stolen from? (Answer here.)

Update II: A couple of different covers of Churchill's book and CD Pacifism as Pathology. Notice that both CDs have Churchill's title wrong--Pacifism and Pathology. A rhetorical question: Did Churchill see these before they were printed? Duh. It's as telling as that on his CU web page the jerk has (probably for years) misspelled the name of the school he got his degrees from.

Update III: Pirate Ballerina comes to Churchill's defense! Well, sort of. The tutu-ed parrot-wearer points out in an e-mail that on his CDs Churchill is merely riffing on his book, so the "and" in the titles may well have been intentional. Arrrgh.

Update IV: On his blog PB also points out the undeniable triviality of the Churchill misspellings and/or typos scandal. He's right, but don't forget, this is a scholar noted for his meticulous and exhaustive documentation.

Sowell-ed down the river

Random thoughts from the middle of nowhere:

Fact learned on the drive to Moab: those high handlebars you sometimes see on motorcycles? They're called "ape hangers."

West of Grand Junction we passed your basic VW hippie van tooling (or rather non-tooling) along about 55 in the right-hand lane of I-70. Driving it, astoundingly, was a long-haired, bearded, hippie, one of those Jesus Christ-looking ones. As we passed he was steering with his elbows as his hands fiddled with something over the dash.

He was rolling a joint.

We did not call "the fuzz."

They're everywhere

In the van (not a VW) down to the put-in a woman was telling Sean the driver how the Chinese have done "so well" with communism because collectivism has been bred into them over the centuries. Observations like this (or as stupid as this anyway) are heard on or in the vicinity of the Green more frequently than one might expect. Sean agreed with the woman, who labored under the name "Cathy." (Sean, by the way, was a bodyguard for--well, all I remember are Suzanne Somers and Bill Murray (who was really nice). Sean is also a poet. Can't speak for his talent, but he's the biggest goddamn poet you ever saw.)

Sitting right behind "Cathy," I roused myself enough to mumble that the Chinese hadn't done "so well" in the late 50s and early 60s. "Oh yeah, the Cultural Revolution and all that," "Cathy" said. Alas, it was far too early in the morning for the wet-brained one to retort, No, not the Cultural Revolution, you eejit.

And she and her family, she said, were moving to China soon. Two words, dear: Crack those books.

Cap'n Campy sez: All freeze-dried dinners, even those labeled "vegetarian," are 40 to 45 percent rat fat.

The photo below right is a major reason the Drunkablog began blogging. He feels guilty about it, but needs to inflict his pain on others:

From the Belknap map of the Green and Colorado rivers. Some viewers of this uber-embarrassing tableau, like one not particularly violent friend of mine, respond to it uncharacteristically: "They're stuck," he says. "Get the flamethrower."

The last couple of years we've also had great fun at the expense of the famously mono-handed Aron Ralston, who performed his little self-modification in Blue John Canyon not far from the Green. Mostly we wonder about that hand he cut off. What happened to it? Then I saw The Crawling Hand and I knew. Every night, Aron's hand sneaks out of its case in Moab's Dan O'Laurie Museum, lookin' for some throttlin'. It lurks in canyons, scuttles through draws, wriggles in festering muckholes. And it is patient.

But it is Aron Ralston's hand, so it is also dumb. Even for a hand. Most of the time it's down at the Slickrock trying to cadge drinks.

Think I'm being too hard on Aron? First, he can probably afford to laugh, perhaps while scratching his head quizzically with his new, multi-tool hand, at my crude japes. Second, if you think my japes are crude, check out this attack on Ralston at Dodge Forum. The spongy livered one comes off quite sophisto by comparison.

Yes, there are quite a few movies about possessed hands.

Update: Dodge Forum? I'm losing it.

Update II: Just realized that the headline for this might sound racist, since Sowell's a black guy and slaves were sold down the river and all. The headline writer (you all know, of course, that the writer of a piece never writes the headline) says it wasn't intended.

Kiss me, Hardy: Drunkablog paddles Green, endures boo-boos

Well, at least Billy Bob was ecstatic at my triumphant return from the Green River:


Or something.

The Drunkawife? Eh. "Och, laddie," she said. "ye'er coom bahck." She'd promised to work on the "spontaneous foreign accent" thing while I was away, and now this.

Significant pause

So here are a few Green River pics.

Landlord's nightmare: "For Rent"--forever. One rm. (10 sq. ft!) riv-vu. Utilities (bucket, ladder) incl.
The Anasazi apparently hung around the Green for only a couple of hundred years or so. No one knows exactly what happened to them, though many say a drought drove them away.

A member of our party, however, theorized that the Anasazi ("ancient evil" in Navaho according to this interesting scientific site (scroll down to "Vampyric theory--complete piece") simply ate too much peyote one day and wandered off, grinning. Many of them, he conjectured, later became Rolfers in San Francisco.


View near John Wesley Powell-named Turk's Head. He and his crew named other formations like "Nefertiti's Head" and "The Sphinx." All bear only a vague resemblance to the people or gods or whatever named, so I guess Powell was an Orientalist.


Man identifying himself only as "Mr. B" relaxes during
Canoeists' Union-mandated two-hour lunch break.
Okay, pretty nice scenery. Here's the scenery your favorite slumlord trainee returned to:


Yerch. Who knew a plumber's friend could be so destructive?

(Slumlord war declared via the Organization of Civic Rights, which for some reason has a problem with people like the Drunkablog who support their luxurious lifestyles on the backs of the poorest of the poor.)

Update: No, I did not "do anything" to Billy Bob's ears. Jeez, no one trusts me around my own stupid dog anymore. And somebody already said long ago that he looks like a cross between an Australian Cattle Dog and Gene Simmons, so you can all shut your kibble-holes.

Paris, London, New York, Moab

A while ago I mentioned that some fellow 'tards and I were going to canoe the wild (along here, anyway) Missouri River this month. We wanted to retrace the steps of Lewis and Clark, backwards of course (since they traveled upstream), and in high heels (well, that's what I wanted to do).

Now everything's changed. One of our number, doing something normally undangerous to arm muscles (Eating peanuts? Picking his nose? Waving at a passing clown? I forget) tore the hell out of his arm muscles, neccesitating surgery and a lengthy immobilization of the armal area.

We, the survivors, decided for that and other reasons to wait 'til next year for the Missouri and put together a last-minute trip on the faithful old Green River.


Utah's Green River: Yawn.
So I'm off Saturday and back September 12.

They think they're so big

I have begged, begged some of my internet heroes to guest blog here while I'm gone, but they were all too busy with their salad shooters or something. It's just possible, however, that the Drunkawife will pipe up now and again in this space. She's tan, rested and reluctant, so we'll see.

If she's worried about matching the incandescence of the Drunkablog's prose, regular readers if he had any would know that the Drunkawife could write "fart" over and over in every post and seem incomprehensibly erudite by comparison. In fact, a small segment of the Drunkablog audience (98.8% +/-) will prefer her keen social awareness and gentle humor to the present jerk's fart jokes and cruelty to animals.

In any case, when I get back there'll be river pictures to inflict and, since we're lousy outdoorspersons, perhaps a riveting tale of cannibalism and survival to relate.

(Salad shooter by computer illustrator Dave Douglass, who draws a mean camcorder, too, though his Tom Selleck scares the crap out of me.)