Uhh, that's ESPN's headline.

What does it mean? Well, first of all it means I'm going to get a couple of dozen more hits from Google today.

Second of all, it means that someone at ESPN set out to write the gayest sports headline ever, concerning a German Swiss soccer franchise called the "Young Boys," who, ummm, play at Wankdorf stadium, and who are relieved that their "erection" (also called a "stadium") is now, uhhh, up and ready for action.

How will ESPN top this? It'll be tough. But I'm tipped their next story will be:

Raging Penis Sweetboys Fondle Nutsacks Turgid Dorkwand Throbbing Funmuscle Jm J. Bullock

Thanks to Tim.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (14)
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They made a big production out of it, but to be fair to the French police, elephant poop is suspicious. I mean, what the hell do you do with it? I can't imagine it's part of a potpourri.

[No link, I was just sent the article in full, without a URL.]

Envelope containing elephant poo sparks alarm



CERGY, France, Aug 4 (AFP) - An envelope leaking a strange pinkish powder sparked an alert in a Paris suburban post office, but tests revealed the substance to be nothing more than desiccated elephant dung, police said Thursday.

With France on high terrorism alert following the London bombings last month, postal workers in a sorting centre in the northwestern suburb of Bonneuil-en-France took no chance when they noticed the strange envelope from Sri Lanka with the powder inside.

After police were called in, six employees who had been exposed to the powder were subjected to medical examinations.

..

Police said the envelope was addressed to a Paris-based immigrant from Sri Lanka who apparently used the pachydermal poo for traditional religious rites.

Traditional religious rites? Okay, whatever. Who knows.

But pink? What sort of elephant was this?

Thanks to Greg.

Posted by: Ace at 09:43 AM | Comments (12)
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To be fair, he doesn't specify Australian soldiers, but they're over there, so...

Religious tolerance does not, and never has, extend as far as including tolerance for actual treason.

If your religion will not allow for loyalty and submission to the sovereign authority of a non-Islamist government, then you're squatting in a country under false pretenses.

I'm not certain if visa applications and immigration paperwork specifically asks questions like this. If they don't, it's about time they specifically began asking for an oath of allegiance (or at least a statement that the applicant will respect all local laws and not militate against the government issuing the visa), and anyone who acts contrary to their guarantees should be either simply ejected or else imprisoned, depending on the nature of the violation. (Lying on such forms, i.e., coming to a country with the specific intent of inciting hatred, violence, and treason, should be punishable by long jail sentences, as it's fraud, and a rather nasty sort of fraud at that).

Thanks to Megan.

Posted by: Ace at 09:34 AM | Comments (8)
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Hmmm... some threads are being used for that purpose, so might as well make it official.

Question: Should I open one of these every night before bed? That way, rather than sending me interesting news items, anyone who wants can just post the links in the the thread. I'll scan through and take the most interesting ones (or the ones I have a glib one-liner for) and make a full post.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (23)
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A doctor of, um, "orgonomy" suggests that liberals have a co-dependent relationship with those who would kill them.

His point is interesting, but...

...okay, what the hell is a "orgonomy"? Merriam Webster didn't provide a definition for that word, but keying on the word "orgone" I found in another article, I got this definition:

Main Entry: or·gone
Pronunciation: 'or-"gOn
Function: noun
Etymology: German Orgon, from Orgasmus orgasm and organisch organic + -on 2-on
: a vital energy held to pervade nature and be a factor in health in the theories of Wilhelm Reich

That gives me some pause, as does the article titled " Lawful Relationship
Between the Rotation Of the Planets and the Galactic Plane:"

Reich discovered, however, that space is not empty but is filled with moving orgone energy. He discovered, through direct observation, that there is a stream of energy that circles the Earth from west to east. He called this the equatorial stream. Using observations of certain formations in the aurora Borealis, he deduced the existence of a second energy stream at 62 degree angle to the equatorial stream, which he called the galactic stream.

That's by the same Robert Harman, M.D., who Roger Simon quotes regarding liberals' foreign-policy masochism.

So, it's sort of a fun little zinger, but I wouldn't get to out on a limb on the authority of Robert Harman.

Thanks to Matt.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (19)
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Bush's team sometimes wanders off the yard but if we give their leashes a nice yank they come back in a hurry.

A war on terror.

Not a struggle against global extremism.

Not a contest against world nasties.

Not a Yahtzee game against the forces of non-multicultural progressivism.

How the hell did the Pentagon botch this one? Did they really think that any jihadis, wannabe jihadis, or jihadi accomplices would say, "Oh, wait, it's not a war on terror? Merely a strugle against global extremism? Let me stop assembling this nail-bomb immediately. Allah forgive me, I feel like such a fool."

How the hell are we going to convince these people that we are deadly serious about this when we can't even seem to convince ourselves?

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 PM | Comments (218)
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The Real Reason Bond Battled SPECTRE (And Why He Stopped Battling SPECTRE)

Just in case anyone cares. The Colussus writes:

My understanding is that the Broccoli/Saltzman team, working in the early 60s, were so freaked out by the Cuban Missile crisis that they wanted to back off the East vs. West divide and provide some escapist fare. I don't think they did it because they sympathized with the commies or were trying to argue for moral equivalence per se -- neither of them were traditional Hollywood leftist types. If they had been, I'm sure our man Jimmy Stewart would have managed to rat them out or performed a barehanded strangulation on them. :-)

Okay, I have little doubt that it was the desire to avoid the "reactionary" politics of Fleming's books (where SMERSH, a Russian counterespionage unit, was usually the bad guy, at least in the beginning of the series) and replace SMERSH with a less political villain. An organization that everyone could agree was bad 'n stuff, because they just wanted to take over, extort, and/or destroy the world.

Here's about how SPECTRE came to be, and why it disappeared from the films. Wikipedia has info on this, but here's my version.

Fleming's books were only marginally successful when they first came out. He considered killing off Bond, but was told not to by a friend, and one of my favorite authors, Raymond Chandler, who thought this British Secret Service hero might have a bit of life and commercial potential in him yet. (Actually, at the end of From Russia With Love, Bond is poisoned and seems to die. I think this might have been where Fleming was debating whether or not to just leave the guy on the slab. But, thanks to Chandler's intervention, James Bond Would Return.)

Fleming tried to get Hollywood interested in Bond, but no offers came. So he began to pen an original Bond screenplay, with the assistance of a man named Kevin McClory. That screenplay was called 78 Degrees Longitude South or something like that.

The screenplay was never sold. Later, John F. Kennedy mentioned that he was currently reading From Russia With Love, which caused the Bond books to go flying off the shelves, and the Salzberg/Brocolli team at EON bought the movie rights. Dr. No was made as the first Bond film, I think maybe because at the time that was the most recent book. (A little trivia: Bond is identified as working for MI-6 in the film, but apparently at that time the British were maintaining that was forbidden to say under the Official Secrets Act, so the line was redubbed to "MI-7," and you can notice the lip-flap flub when M says this.)

Now, Fleming still has this old incomplete script lying around. Much of the script is reworked into a novel, which is called, eventually, Thunderball. Including an idea that the Fleming/McClory partnership had created (it's disputed whose idea it was): that there should be a big, apolitical villainous organization out there blackmailing NATO with nuclear weapons, and that it should be called SPECTRE, and headed by a mysterious Eastern European named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Fleming, however, fails to give McClory any credit when Thunderball comes out as a book, and no money, either. This provokes a threat of a lawsuit. Later editions of the book are co-credited to McClory and a third man who also helped with the old script (whose name escapes me, but it doesn't matter, because he drops out of the story).

Years and years pass and McClory is still pretty pissed off. SPECTRE was intended to be the villainous organaization in The Spy Who Loved Me, but McClory threatens legal action and TSPWLM script wars end with SPECTRE being dropped as a villain. Blofeld is replaced by some guy with webbed hands named Kronbourg or something.

This legal cloud hangs over the Bond franchise and United Artists/MGM for a while. Eventually, a deal is reached: SPECTRE can no longer be mentioned in any Bond film; McClory will get credit and some back payments for Thunderball; and he has the right, at some point, to produce a re-make of Thunderball.

Ever notice that Never Say Never Again didn't have the Bond opening, the Bond music, the usual Bond characters (M, Q, etc.), and seemed suspiciously similar in plotline to Thunderball? Well, that was McClory's remake of Thunderball, made not with the EON/UA/MGM people but with a competing studio. (Later on, MGM would buy NSNA and add it to its Bond library.)

Now there were even lawsuits over Never Say Never Again-- how far can you deviate from the original script and still call it a "remake"? Now it was EON/UA/MGM threatening legal action if this "remake" departed too far from Thunderball and became a free-standing, original (competing-franchise) Bond picture.

Eventually that was all worked out too, and the story is pretty much just Thunderball with a black Felix Leiter and a couple of changes in location.

No longer able to use Blofeld or SPECTRE as villains, the EON people dispensed with someone who looks like Blofeld (but, for legal reasons, is never identified as Blofeld) at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only. He was dispatched quickly and almost as a joke after being an implacable and ruthless Bond foe for ten movies, just because of legal considerations.

Bond could never truly vanquish Blofeld, but eventually the lawyers did.

Hmmm... maybe Kerry & Clinton had the right ideas about how to deal with Osama bin Ladin after all.

007 Says "Shut Up And Stop Carrying On Like a Jerkoff:" It's Secret Service Serendipity as Cathy Seipp digs up a very dry Roger Moore slam on a misbehaving actor that leaves him shaken if not stirred.

Posted by: Ace at 03:52 PM | Comments (22)
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Talent... now there's an idea. I wish I could bottle all the creativity and outside-the-box thinking at CBS and sell it! I'd make a freakin' fortune!

In related news:

Playboy Magazine announces "Playmates-of-Large-Breasts-and-Narrow-Waists-and-Long-Legs-and-Asses-Like-a-Colt-Stallion" Talent Development Program

NFL selects three candidates for "Big-Dudes-Who-Can-Hit-Real-Real-Hard" Outreach Program

New York City Crackwhores proudly unveil "Runaways-With-Daddy-Issues-and-Low-Self-Esteem-And-Don't-Really-Mind-Strange-Croatian-Men-Masturbating-Into-Your-Slippers" Qualified Candidate Plan

Ace of Spades creates "Please-Someone-In-Hollywood-Call-Me-I'm-Dyin'-Over-Here" Self-Promotion/Whining Initiative

Asses of Jack, they are.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (9)
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The blogosphere is exploding.

And I don't like it one bit.

I liked it much better when the competition was restricted to just a few million fellow shut-in malcontents. Now it's ten million or so.

I think we need some sort of guild system, like the MSM has, to keep these partisan, reckless, non-multiple-layers-of-painstaking-editorial-fact-checking upstarts out of our little game.

Oh, I'm all in favor of competition. Except when people are competing with me. Then it's just rude and boorish.

Thanks again to The Blogometer.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (17)
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You remember them. The beauty-school staffers and students who savagely (and I mean that in a good way) beat the stuffings out of a would-be stick-up man.

KelliPundit has an update. The robber is still showing signs of emotional distress.

And not just emotional damage:

"I believe I counted 21 open lacerations to his skull area that required sutures or staples," Mason testified Tuesday before Caddo District Judge Scott Crichton. "He had a shoe print forced through his clothes to his skin. He had severely been stomped by someone."

Now that's justice-- Ace of Spades Justice (TM).

Posted by: Ace at 10:37 AM | Comments (19)
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