Eh, why not. They already give grants so people can watch porn all day.

A team of academics who regularly play World of Warcraft say they have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for an effort to recruit more scholars to the online game.

The group's ambassador, "pantherleader," is soliciting applications from scholars who can boast of both an advanced degree and a familiarity with the film work of Rutger Hauer.

What? Not even Rutger Hauer has a familiarity with the film work of Rutger Hauer.

...

But as one academic points out, even the most sympathetic professors may not want to risk growing obsessed with life in a virtual world: "I won't leave my house. I won't publish. My job will disappear as I ascend to Level 60 with addictionlike tenacity," writes the scholar. "No sir, you won't have me in your guild."

Thanks to Slublog, eighth level paste-eater.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (23)
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Does anyone get what the hell talking to Syria and Iran could possibly accomplish?

If the war in Iraq is truly lost, then fine -- it's lost. Then let's get out, but let's keep open the option of attacking the malignant cancer of Iran. Only James Baker could figure out a way to not only lose a war he believes is lost, but compound that loss by furthermore making the appeasement of the world's most dangerous state a further insult to our injury.

We've known he was going to call for this for a while. So I've already addressed this stupidity.

Can someone please explain to me how the US benefits by rewarding Iran further for its unending support of terrorism against us in Iraq?

I've never heard anything so stupid in my life. We lose a big prize to Iran, and Baker's advice is to offer even bigger prizes to Iran for helping kill 2800 of our soldiers?

Or is it just that Baker wants to see Israel crushed, and figures this is as good a time as any to help the Arab terrorists wipe it off the map?

The fact that Bush is even giving this report the happy-talk treatment disgusts me.

I hate to repeat myself, but I have to. If Iran has defeated us in Iraq, then "talking to them" is merely adding an armistace and recognition of their conquest via a treaty, when the proper response is a cold war and the threat of retaliation to come later.

Baker wants us to recognize Iran's victory by formal treaty. Why? What possible good could that do us?

We don't need Iran's help to have a defeat in Iraq. We already have that, if we so choose. Why is it necessary to further appease Iran to gain its "help" in executing our defeat neatly?

Fucking old senile bastard.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi's new Intelligence Committee Leader actually is calling for 20,000 to 30,000 additional troops to help defang the Iran-armed militias.

Isn't that an odd response? Actually trying to win a war rather than granting the enemy concessions on top of a formal surrender?

I guess that doesn't fit in with the Baker school of "realism" (i.e., sucking up to Arabs, helping Iran gain an atomic bomb, using the power of the US to help destroy the beleagured state of Israel.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (154)
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Breathtaking, isn't it? Putin is the strongest suspect in a murder, and he has the balls to demand Blair turn over a political refugee to his tender mercies for his assistance in pretending he's not a killer.

Again: This is what Ahmadinejad with a nuke will be like. Only he'll be far worse.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (33)
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Jason tipped me last night that there would be a "significant annoncement" about Mars. I figured it wouldn't be anything interesting, as the news would have leaked already.

Guess I was wrong.

Dramatic new photographs of Mars have revealed the possible existence of water on its surface.

The images - released for the first time on Wednesday by the US space agency NASA - were taken earlier this year in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the Red Planet.

...

NASA researchers have documented the formation of new craters on the plant's surface and found bright, light-coloured deposits in gullies that were not present in previous photos.

They concluded the deposits - possibly mud, salt or frost - were left there when water recently cascaded through the channels.

In another photo a number of gullies on a crater wall can be clearly seen. The scientists believe that they may have been formed in relatively recent Martian history by erosion caused by flowing, liquid water.

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Comments (43)
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The best part is the bomb-sniffing dogs:

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority.

The plane landed safely. The FBI, Transportation Safety Administration and airport authority responded to the emergency, Lowrance said.

The passengers and five crew members were brought off the plane, together with all the luggage, to go through security checks again. Bomb-sniffing dogs found spent matches.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal body odor, Lowrance said. The woman lives near Dallas and has a medical condition.

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane.

"American has banned her for a long time," Lowrance said.

Thanks to JohnMc.

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Comments (44)
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I've been attempting this for almost three years. It's the whole point of the blog.

For nearly 20 years — ever since Pete Costello was 8 — his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car.

But now prosecutors say it was all a huge fraud, and they have video of Costello contesting a traffic ticket to prove it.

"He's like any other person trying to get out of a traffic ticket," Assistant U.S. Attorney Norman Barbosa said Tuesday.

Pete and Rosie Marie Costello were indicted in September on charges of conspiracy to defraud the government and Social Security fraud, and the case was unsealed Tuesday. The Vancouver pair were scheduled to appear in federal court in Tacoma on Tuesday.

Barbosa said he planned to file with the court two videos of Pete Costello taken this year: In one, he allegedly feigns retardation during an interview with Social Security workers; the other is of him contesting the traffic ticket in a courtroom earlier this year.

The indictment accuses Costello of faking — or at least exaggerating — retardation since August 1997, because that is what prosecutors are confident they can prove, Barbosa said. But the pair first received benefits 10 years before that.

The benefits cited in the indictment totaled $111,000.

Thanks to chickpea and yls.

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 AM | Comments (21)
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Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (40)
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I'd say it's mildly not safe for work, but it's not a text file, it's a jpg of a text printed on to a piece of typewriter paper, and it's in small print to boot, so there's really no danger of getting caught.

But you probably will laugh, and that might draw the boss' attention.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (73)
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No, you can't.

This is old, as it already has its own Wikpedia entry.

Still, it's new to me.

Thanks to PetiteDov.

Posted by: Ace at 12:29 PM | Comments (29)
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Who? Oh yeah, he's the lunatic with dreams of assassinating Don Rumsfeld who set himself on fire to protest the war.

This disgusting and cloying Guardian piece attempts to use the suicide of a pathetic psychotic for political advantage.

Ritscher's death, four days before the American mid-term elections, wasn't the shocking, national news story he had hoped it would be when he doused himself in petrol and set himself alight, next to a video camera and a small sign reading, "Thou shalt not kill." It hardly made a ripple in Chicago's mainstream media until an alternative newspaper picked it up. Nationally and internationally, his death has gone virtually unnoticed.

Hmmm... basket case offs himself. Shocking that it didn't get more media attention. Why, that sort of thing only happens ten or twelve times per week.

Well, I guess that does seem a little common. But this guy had a sign. Not just a suicide note. Like, a whole sign and shit.

BULLETIN: Mentally unstable depressive narcissist commits grisly act in futile attempt to get attention he could never command in life. Stop presses.

Although he had held protests against the Iraq war for several years...

He had also held protests against space aliens, Bigfoot Skinheads, and what he called "CranAmerica," the scheme of the Jew-run National Cranberry Growers Association to put cranberries into everything, including CranBalogna, CranPorkRinds, and even infiltrate the human procreative process itself with a new product called "CranGina."

A would-be assassin = "eccentric." I'll note that for my stylebook.

"If I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world," he wrote. "I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country."

Finance the war? How? I don't get the sense that this guy had to worry very much about changes in the top marginal income tax rates.

Ritscher had hoped his suicide by self-immolation - a symbolic act which has long been used as a political protest - would be a wake-up call for America, for which he was prepared to martyr himself. "We have become worse than the imagined enemy - killing civilians and calling it 'collateral damage', torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders." He wrote that Americans are "more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cellphones than the future of the world". The response to his death shows that, if nothing else, he was sadly right about that.

Here's my eulogy: Adios, Torchie. Vaya con Feugo. Fuck this lunatic waste of carbon, and fuck the vicious little preening cry-whore who vomited up this bile.

Somewhere, Che-Che's daughter's eyes are welling up with tears.

Thanks to Mikey.

It's Not A Media Event Without A T-Shirt Update: Buy your own t-shirt proudly declaring "I Heard You, Malachi."

I heard him too. He said "AAAUUUUGHH!!! OOHHHHHH!!! OH, JESUS, JESUS GOD, MY SKIN IS PEELING OFF IN BLACK FLAKES!!! MY LIPS JUST BURST OPEN FROM HEAT!!! GOOD LORD IN HEAVEN, I DID NOT FULLY THINK THIS THROUGH!!"

Thanks to Irene for that.

Bgates writes:

If he didn't want to pay taxes, he could have just not paid them, and gone to prison. Or he coulda gone overseas. Maybe to Iraq, where he could stop the killing by acting as one of those human shields.

Hey, whatever happened to those guys?

Yeah, it's funny how quickly the brave Peace Warriors disappear when the bullets start flying, huh?

A Beautiful Eulogy... By "Malachi V."

We few, we happy few, we bundle of kindling;

For he to-day that burns himself with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so combustible,

This day shall enflame his condition;

And gentlemen in Chicago now watching sports or downloading ringtones,

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That got to see me get crispy today.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (53)
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