Via Archaeoblog:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

On the one hand, I'm very happy to see progress being made in any science.

On the other hand, I sort of feel bad for the children of the future, who will be forced to read more crap by Sophocles and Euripedes.

Imagine being told in tenth grade they'd discovered a sequel to Beowulf, or the "lost chapters" of the Canterbury Tales. If you were a teenager on the edge, wouldn't you just hang yourself at that point?

Seriously. I considered that option myself numerous times while reading Ivanhoe. The only thing that kept me from riding the .45 Express to Oblivion was the nagging feeling that it was the coward's way out.

And also, someone gave me their Cliff's Notes.

Sometimes the ethical duty of a scientist is to consider the consequences of his work and, if it is likely his work will result in horrors untold, abandon it posthate.

Via The Perfect World.

And While You're "Down There" Update: If you love/hate the movies like me, you might want to check out this thread on the worst movie lines of all time.

Posted by: Ace at 07:52 AM | Comments (21)
Post contains 352 words, total size 2 kb.

Voinovich of Ohio could support Bolton. Gee, thanks.

Football Fans For Truth and Beyond opines that if this sissy can't even support Bolton, there's no way he'll have the clakas to go nuclear.

They're trademarking the slur "Voinobitch." I would never stoop to such petty name-calling here, of course, but if others want to engage in that sort of playground rank-outing, what can a civil and civic-minded soul such as I do?

It Pains Me That Other People Get the Recognition I So Richly Don't Deserve Update: Football Fans has been a "Webby Worthy" by the, err, prestigious web-awards, the Webbies.

As "Cal Lanier" did much to shape the Ace of Spades persona, sometimes by laughing at my jokes, more often by turning me into the angry, inadequate wreck you know and love through her withering derision and contempt, I figured I would give her a shout-out and ask, "How do you like your neurotic monster now?"

Posted by: Ace at 07:19 AM | Comments (10)
Post contains 169 words, total size 1 kb.

Apparently my top ten list below is being blast-faxed around -- without any attribution whatsoever.

How difficult is it to include a frickin' "From www.aceofspadeshq.com" when you're sending around someone else's work?

Bloggers don't make much money off this dumb hobby. Most make none at all.

What we're looking for -- the only things we're looking for -- are credit and traffic. Why would someone be so stupid as to deny someone something so minor when it's so easy to provide ?

Very annoying.

If you're getting emailed the Top Ten list, do me a favor and tell whoever sent it that they should send it out with a link to this site.

And please let me know if the list should happen to appear on anyone else's site without a hat-tip. Thanks.

Posted by: Ace at 06:23 AM | Comments (15)
Post contains 143 words, total size 1 kb.

Utron searches for the quote that the good Professor Bainbridge couldn't find.

As a Sullyologist, I know all about the lack of a search function on Andrew Sullivan's site, and how frustrating it is to look for an egregious post you remember but cannot find except through the brute-force method of scanning through Sullivan's histrionic burblings.

You know that $100,000 that suckers gave him every year for the last several years? (Some of those chumps are now here; you probably feel filled with heart-ache, as you should.) Well, not a fat lot of that went into his much-heralded website improvements, unless you count being able to toggle from gray to lavender and back again some sort of technological breakthrough.

Anyway.

Sullivan's in high dudgeon now about the Church divorcing itself from him due to the election of this gob-smackingly vile man Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

But, as ever, Sullivan tends to rewrite the past as necessary to cast himself as the focus of drama in every major story that plays out in the media. He pretended to be an anguished Bush-supporter, "debating" whether or not to continue that support, months after he'd announced he could not support Bush in The Advocate.

And similarly now he plays the juicy role of the wounded-but-faithful Catholic, horrified at what his church has become.

Except, it seems, he pretty much renounced Catholicism a year and a half ago:

Since the summer, I haven't written about this much, because it felt increasingly inappropriate to bring such deeply private issues into the public arena. But like many others, this past year has been a watershed for me. The combination of the cover-up of sexual abuse and the extremity of the language used against gay people by the Vatican has made it impossible for me to go back inside a church. I do believe that something is rotten in the heart of the hierarchy, that it is bound up in sexual panic and a conflicted homosexual subculture that is a deep part of the Catholic Church. Until that is dealt with, until a new dynamic of hope and honesty replaces denial and authoritarianism, I cannot go on. Am I still a Catholic? I don't think I can call myself such publicly any more. Privately, I think I always will be in some place in my heart. But I cannot enable the vicious cycle of failure and scapegoating that now animates what amounts to the leadership.

Emphasis added, to help guide you through Sullivan's rather eye-glazing prose.

Compare with his recent noises about leaving the Church:

Thanks for your emails both sympathizing and telling me to leave the Church entirely. But I am still in shock. This was not an act of continuity. There is simply no other figure more extreme than the new Pope on the issues that divide the Church. No one.

Obviously, I've got no problems with apostacy. Sullivan can criticize the church to his heart-ache's content. And he can leave the church any time he likes.

But what is this crap about no longer considering himself a Catholic in 2003, and now praising JPII in order to denigrate The Madman Ratzinger? How can he threaten to walk out a Church he renounced a year and a half ago?

To be fair, I really don't think Sullivan is trying to be dishonest, as I suggested above. That was a bit of, ahem, Sullivanesque hyperbole.

It's not that he's dishonest, per se. It's that he's so mercurial and inconsistent that there is no definable "truth" to him. At least not a truth that persists from one outburst to the next.

This is the problem with his wildly bipolar style of "analysis" -- he loves someone one day and denounces him as the devil the next, with very little explanation as to how his thoughts could have changed so radically over the course of months.

Although, of course, the one time he did attempt to explain how his feelings were "evolving" --actually, they'd already evolved-- the backing-and-filling necessary to show "consistency" on the Bush v. Kerry question was, to use some choice Sullyisms, "sickening" in its calculation and "nauseating" in its transparency.

I just don't see how people can continue to read this guy, to depend on him for thoughtful and sober analysis, when his "Who's Hot/Who's Not" rankings change so dramatically week by week.

Okay, I've spilled enough pixels on this nitwit. Seriously, I'm not writing the words "Andrew" or "Sullivan" or "Andy" or "Sully" or any permutation thereof for at least a week.

Unless he writes something so gob-smackingly vile that I feel physically sickened, of course.

Catch-22 Says It Best: This is from memory, so pardon me if make some sort of appallingly horrifying error.

Let us say, charitably, that Sullivan is a rather passionate fellow. Catch-22 had something like this to say about another passionate fellow:

Clevinger was passionate about justice. He was passionate about many subjects. He was crazy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:47 PM | Comments (26)
Post contains 849 words, total size 5 kb.

Slublog was nice enough to send me a color-coded warning system, but I held off on posting it, because Allah said he was working on one, and I suspected it would be better.

Slublog agreed.

We were both right.

A-hem: Please pardon the light blasphemy. It's Sullivan who's on the cross, according to his own lights.

15 Yards For A Late Hit But Worth The Penalty Update: John from Wuzzadem made the classic mistake-- never go up against AllahPundit when photoshopping is on the line.

Still, he's done his own Sullivan Emotional Status Alert, and this one has descriptions of each level of heart-ache and funny pictures!

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 PM | Comments (65)
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

A new reader wants me to explain the Paul Anka thing.

Well, it's sort of like walking into Return of the King when Frodo's got Gollum chewing off his fingers and asking for a brief recap of the whole LOTR trilogy.

But, quickly: Listen to this first, a secretly-recorded audio of Paul Anka reaming out his band. Hysterical. Not work safe.

Then check out the other entries in the sidebar under "The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick." Make sure you do not miss AllahPundit's Paul Anka Record Collection or Integrity SAT's: The Entrance Test For Paul Anka's Band.

Link Fixed! Allah was kind enough to let me host his record collection photoshops on my site. So I changed the link to point to my own site. It should work now.

And Oh Yeah... In a bit of blogging kismet, a guy turned up one day who was actually a lighting-guy for Paul Anka, and gave me Vinny Falcone's business card and all sorts of cool stuff.

He comments here now as Man of Substance, a thoroughly brilliant monicker that I, of course, thought up.

Posted by: Ace at 05:00 PM | Comments (33)
Post contains 199 words, total size 1 kb.

This cannot be helped. Sorry.

Over at future co-host Karol's site, Dowtown Lad (please don't give him traffic; be a sport, huh?) is, in the comments, once again accusing me of being homophobic.

His evidence for this?

1, I accuse Andrew Sullivan of being hyperemotional, which is a stereotype used to mock gays.

Well, it's true-- I do accuse him of that. But it's not my fault that Sullivan has chosen to make himself into a stereotype. If the man is going to use the most egregiously hyperbolic language to express his "outrage" at everything under the sun, what am I to do? Pretend he's as laconic as Clint Eastwood on hashish?

Every hysterically-emotional word I used in my parodies comes straight from Sullivan's keyboard, as I demonstrate here.

2, he whines that one post is titled "Andrew Sullivan is an Ass," and you know, writing "ass" within ten words of the name of a known homosexual means that you're, you know, talking about homo-stuff.

Well, for one thing, that title comes straight from the Professor Bainbridge article I'm linking there.

For another thing, when I want to make a sodomy joke, I know how to do so, as longtime readers of this site can well attest.

The Ace of Spades Tolerance-Towards-Gay-Men Guarantee

I've got nothing against gay men. I just wouldn't want them marrying my daughters.

Why no similar statement about lesbians?

Does any straight guy really have to make this sort of a declaration about lesbians? Come on. Straight guys love lesbians. If only that love weren't so painfully unrequited.

Columbo Says "Oh there's just one more thing..." Update: I'm not the only one who's noticed that Andrew is, let us say, a bit high-strung. Don Luskin, I think, first pointed it out, and I realized he was right-- and this was in the days of "Good Conservative Andrew." But I still knew that Luskin was right to point out that, in between hectoring people about civility, Sullivan employs the most emotionally-charged language and nasty ad hominem attacks.

And "Excitable Andy" was not coined by me. I wish I'd that one to my credit. Nope, that was the work of the notorious homophobe Mickey Kaus.

"I'm not making this stuff up."*

*Where?

Posted by: Ace at 04:37 PM | Comments (33)
Post contains 380 words, total size 2 kb.

Any chance of getting a diagnosis for that squashed ferret he wears on his head?

Anyway, network news' answer to Mr. Spock, except without all the charisma and human warmth, has some stuff to say about network news that I'd appreciate more if it weren't coming out of the mouth of an idiot:

"I think it's dead. Sorry," he said during a breakfast panel Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas. "The monster anchors are through."

Donaldson, Ensign Chekov, and Yeoman Rand* also agreed bloggers were pretty f'n' cool:

The three also agreed that that Internet bloggers have had a generally positive impact on news because mainstream reporters are forced to better verify their information and pare opinions out of their work or face he wrath of scrutinizing critics.

Huh. Jeepers, and all along that's what I thought those "multiple layers of careful editorial fact-checking" were for.

Nope. It's on us. They've outsourced their fact-checking to unpaid retards like me whose idea of professional excellence is to land a job that keeps me well-stocked in Nina Hartley videos and Cheez Whiz.

* She's the one with all the jugs. All of them.

Posted by: Ace at 02:39 PM | Comments (16)
Post contains 208 words, total size 1 kb.

WHEN DOES A JOKE OFFICIALLY JUMP THE SHARK? About four of these posts ago. These parodies have become gob-smackingly repetitive, and the fact that I'm trotting out jokes I told a year ago in a slightly changed format is nauseatingly vile.

So, that wraps it up.

A lot of you have asked me to rip on Sullivan more. Well, you got your fill today. Now I'll go back to ignoring him for a while.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (19)
Post contains 74 words, total size 1 kb.

STILL RUMINATING BETWEEN BUSH AND KERRY: Unlike those hacks at NRO, I take my time in making a decision. Yes, I did endorse Kerry and I did vote for him in November, but damnit, I am ferociously independent and I still have trouble committing to a single candidate.

I do appreciate that Kerry said something or other about terrorists being "not my kind of guys." That fills my heart with soaring hope that the Democratic Party "gets it" on this vital question.

You'll be the first to know of my decision. Well, the readers of the Advocate will technically be the first to know. But you'll find out shortly thereafter, so what the hell are you complaining about?

Fill my tipjar. Analysis like this doesn't just grow on trees, you know.

Posted by: Ace at 02:25 PM | Comments (1)
Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.