Posts from — March 2007

In discussing intelligence analysts I often said that no professional analyst would ever make a flat, unequivocal negative statement, because you can’t prove negatives. My example was usually: “an intelligence analyst would never claim there were no unicorns.”

Now there is a case in point from Billings, Montana on March 14: Man Tells Cops Unicorn Caused Crash

A man told police not to blame him for crashing his truck into a light post – it was that unicorn behind the wheel. Prosecutor Ingrid Rosenquist said Phillip C. Holliday Jr. initially denied driving the truck involved in the March 7 crash in Billings. He told officers at the scene that a unicorn was driving, she said.

See, the analyst who claimed there are no unicorns would have to explain his position, and be asked, probably by Dana Rohrabacher, if he/she had checked Billings before making that statement.

Update: Elayne Riggs at Comicmix has a follow-up – it was the prosecutor, not the drunk, who brought up unicorns.

I have no power to enforce it, but I think a new rule is necessary in the world of American politics:

The phrases, “mistakes were made” and “I take responsibility”, should only be used in letters of resignation or suicide notes.

From BBC corespondent, Matt Frei – Washington diary: Republican panic

Not surprisingly, a joke is making the Beltway rounds: “A lonesome Republican voter is accosted by a gunman in the dead of night. The gunman points his weapon at the hapless voter and asks: ‘Who will you vote for? Romney? McCain? Or Giuliani?’

The Republican thinks deeply, then shrugs and says: ‘OK. Go ahead and shoot me!'”

3/14 is Albert’s birthday and

Π Day.

I assume you have all shopped for the perfect gift.

Some people don’t understand: it’s not just a number, it’s a mission.

To get you started: Π ≈ 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028
841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679…..

The Iditarod official site reports that Lance Mackey arrived in Nome at 20:08:41 AKDT.

Mackey won the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race three years running and has now won the 1,100 mile Iditarod from Anchorage to Nome in 9 days, 9 5 hours, 8 minutes, and 41 seconds. His father and brother are former Iditarod winners, all of them wearing bib number 13.

The Anchorage Daily News just updated to announce the win, and they have a background piece. ADN is reporting a time of 9 days, 5 hours, 8 minutes, and 41 seconds.

Update: they both agree on 5 hours this morning.

There have been a lot of posts recently about the decision of certain blogs to wipe their blog rolls and start over. This is a decision by the individual blog owner, but it does affect the de-listed blogs also.

Technorati uses links to rank people. That is exactly how they derive their rating system, and Google uses a similar system to rate pages, so the loss of links does alter the “prestige” of a blog.

People look at the Sitemeter counter and announce various milestones being reached, but they aren’t all aware that blogs generally have more readers that Sitemeter counts, because a lot of people subscribe to a blog’s “feed”, and don’t actually visit the site itself. If you have your own site you can look at the site’s statistics to give you an idea of how many visitors you have. It will be more accurate, but it’s a pain. If your blog is on one of the blog hosts, like Blogger, those stats are not available.

[Read more →]

General Peter Pace, USMC, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, needs to read his job description.

Arlo can help. Just listen to Alice’s Restaurant:

…and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

(“KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?”)

I went over to the sergeant, said, “Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench, I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” He looked at me and said, “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington.”

According to AND, Mackey, Gebhardt duel for lead on home stretch. They helped each other taking turns leading on the Yukon River run, and now they are sprinting to the end.

Aliy Zirkle has dropped to 19^th, making Sigrid Ekran of Norway the leading rookie and leading woman at 17^th place.

Susan Butcher, the four-time winner who died of leukemia in August of 2006, was honored by being assigned the number 1 which was carried by her daughters, Tekla and Chisana, as they led the ceremonial start in Anchorage.

Her husband, David Monson, is traveling from their homestead to Nome by dogsled and stopping to scatter some of her ashes at her favorite spot on the trail. Tekla is accompanying her dad with her own sled and team on the 650 mile journey, and hopes to be allowed to pass under the arch in Nome.

Kiley gone – good riddance to bad rubbish.

Having figured out that it would be a cold day in Cheney’s undisclosed location before the Senate approved his third star, Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, the man who ignored problems at Walter Reed from 2000 to 2004, has retired.

He should have been the first to go.

From the Anchorage Daily News: Buser, King are up front, but far from confident.

The problem is the stiff headwinds as you head up the Yukon River which are producing windchills of -30°, and blowing gritty snow into the faces of mushers and dogs.

Kevin Klott is the reporter on the scene for ADN and he has a nice feature piece on Rachael Scdoris:

Legally-blind musher Rachael Scdoris hired Tim Osmar of Kasilof to be her visual trail interpreter to reach Nome in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race last year. But this year the Oregon musher is using her thumb to travel the 1,100-mile trail.

[snip]

Scordis didn’t enter the Iditarod this year so she could focus on college. She’s attending a community college in Bend, Ore.

[snip]

She was the first legally blind musher to finish the Iditarod and plans to run it again.

Aliy Zirkle is the leading woman in the race at 16^th, and Sigrid Ekran of Norway is first among the rookie mushers at 18^th.

Congress just stole an hour of your life. This post doesn’t exist because it was posted at 2:00AM, except there is no 2:00AM, it magically became 3:00AM.

I don’t guess anyone considered asking people to voluntarily start an hour earlier, instead of messing with the clocks. You could call it summer hours.

March 11^th, 2004, Madrid

Nuestros profundos condolencias en vuestra perdida.

Todos somos Madrileños.

M-11

BBC In Depth

Florida License Plates

Beneficiary

A weekend feature of Why Now.

I wouldn’t advise people to stand too close to William DonoWho as he should be erupting at any moment.

Thomas Eagleton died on March 4^th and in his written farewell to friends and family he was kind of blunt:

Former Sen. Thomas Eagleton had the last word at his own funeral Saturday, urging his friends and family in a farewell letter to “go forth in love and peace — be kind to dogs — and vote Democratic.”

[snip]

He said he didn’t miss the Senate once he left it, except for the debate on the “horrible, disastrous Iraq War that … will go down in American history as one of our greatest blunders … and as a curse to our Constitution when Attorney General John Ashcroft attempted to put a democratic face on torture.”

A Roman Catholic, he criticized the church’s veer to the right, in which “we seem to have merged God’s power into political power.”

As if that wasn’t enough Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby Kennedy’s eldest daughter:

…In a new book, “Failing America’s Faithful,” Kennedy Townsend joins former senator Jack Danforth and other “old school” politicians in mourning a world in which being Christian meant caring for others and making sacrifices to solve problems.

And so she suggests reforms that she believes will revitalize her beloved Catholic Church and refocus the faithful on service. The hierarchy in Rome, she says, needs to stop obsessing about sex. It needs to rethink its position on the ordination of women and married people, on abortion, on gay clergy and gay unions. “Clearly,” she says, “if we can believe in the virgin birth and that the body and blood of Christ are in the eucharist, then we can certainly believe that a woman can be a priest.” These recommendations will infuriate Catholic traditionalists, but Kennedy Townsend doesn’t care: she loves her church and she’s not leaving. “The church,” she says, “is full of possibilities.”

Just maintain your distance and let him spew, because any man who would ruthlessly hound two young women trying to earn a living will certainly attack. I mean if he doesn’t he would be considered a bit of a bully who only goes up against powerless private citizens and not those with money and a microphone.