Neat "mathemagic" game, which should appeal to you, especially if you're eight years old.

Still kinda neat.

The more interesting thing is why it works. John Derbyshire explains it at the corner.

Thanks for both to Craig.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (5)
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A while ago I saw David Blaine's Street Magic and kind of liked his levitation trick.

I looked up the explanation on line a while ago. For some reason I just thought I'd link it tonight.

It's the oldest trick in the book, so old, in fact, that most people haven't seen it, because most magicians think it's too hokey and silly.

But it kind of works-- it's an easy enough trick to practice.

If you saw Street Magic and are thinking, "No, that's not the way he did it, I saw him lift right off the ground when there was clearly a foot of space under his feet" -- well, that was just a shot done with him on a wire. The live shots with him interacting with a crowd are done via the very old-school Balducci Levitation technique.

Posted by: Ace at 10:30 PM | Comments (11)
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With all due respect: Who the hell wasn't warned?

I was warned. You wer warned. Everyone in New Orleans, Louisiana, the entire Gulf Coast and, for that matter, every tuna-boat mate in Nome, Alaska was warned.

For five days running that's what all the talk on TV was about.

The breaching of the levees was always a possibility. They were only supposed to protect against a cat 3 storm, and a cat 5 storm is what was expected to hit New Orleans. (Actually, it turned out to be cat 3 when it hit, and the badly engineered levees still didn't hold back the water. The water just went beneath them. They hadn't been sunk deeply enough.)

Did Bush know the levees might be breached? Of course he friggin' knew.

This is news?

The article doesn't really inquire too deeply about why Katheleen Blanco refused federal help, or why she didn't order a mandatory evacuation. Or why Mayor Nagin didn't have his police round up stragglers and put them on to all those buses waiting in New Orleans parking lots.

FEMA is an emergency management organization, which generally comes in after a disaster. Pre-disaster work is still supposed to be done by local authorities.

Who didn't.

But of course it's Bush's fault. After all-- he was warned the levees might be breached!

As was every viewer of CNN and FoxNews, and every reader of Drudge.

And, for that matter, every reader of this stupid moronblog. That post takes you to a Katrina round-up at Michelle Malkin's, right before the storm hits, noting that, as we now all know, the city is 12 feet below sea level and may be completely flooded by a powerful storm.

Did Ron Fourier take an extra dose of stupid pills today?

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 PM | Comments (44)
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Or E. Gary Gygax, as super-hardcore nerds know him.

That's right. He put his initials -- E. G. G. -- into the massive floorplan of the cargo deck of the spaceship in Expedition to Barrier Peak.

Anyway, the talk to him about the shift in role-playing away from pencil-and-paper to computer.

For some reason, people who play these games on the computer think they're less dorky than those who roll dice and stuff. Guys? You're still playing D&D.

Via the Corner, via BlogIdaho.

Posted by: Ace at 04:26 PM | Comments (41)
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An anonymous anti-war activist hired a known anti-war pollster (John Zogby - the guy who said Kerry would win last year) to poll US troops in Iraq. And guess what? They were overwhelmingly against staying in Iraq. But we are told it was an honest and fair polling! Maybe you can pull that crap with degenerates like Chris Matthews, but Tanker don't play that game!

You want to know how lame this poll is?

Four in five said they oppose the use of such internationally banned weapons as napalm and white phosphorous.

In my unscientific poll of GIs, four out of five say that there is not enough napalm or "willie pete" used in Iraq!

Or as we all know:

Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing in the world smells like that.
Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...

Posted by: Tanker at 12:19 PM | Comments (35)
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The forgotten successful war:

Afghanistan (CNN) -- President Bush made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday, his first to the country where U.S. forces ousted the Taliban following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Bush met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a five-hour unannounced stopover en route to India and Pakistan.

Karol wants to know if we'll be hearing "plastic turkey" fables about this.

Then again, screw Karol. She moved me to her Boston section. I don't feel like a Bostonian. I'm New York, baby. I'm just slumming for a few months.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (27)
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Their house was pelted with eggs. Annonymous phone callers said they were happy the young man was dead.

Nice.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (36)
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You hate this. I hate this. It's annoying for you and demeaning for me.

I can't even offer totebags like PBS does. This site is a Greenpeace... For Evil. And evil just doesn't happen, folks.

So if you like the site and you've got $40 bucks in your pocket that will just go towards unnecessary expenditures like medicine for your children, hey, why not skip that wasteful spending and drop the money on me?

It would really help. I incurred a lot of expenses in moving and I'm now, ludicrously, attempting to get by only on crazy blog-money to see if it's possible. I've got a couple more advertisers who will help in that, but they're not ready to go yet. (On the plus side, I'm taking down Google ads, which nets me like a cool thirty-seven cents a day.)

This old begging post should put you in the mood to donate.

This PayPal button in the left sidebar (just under the ads and headlines) will take you to the PayPal donation site. Note: The button I had here in the post didn't seem to be working. But the sidebar button seems to. Or at least it works for me.

Remember, you don't actually need a PayPal account to donate. I just need one to receieve that sweet blog money. All you need is a debit or credit card. You can even make a donation by a check, electronically. I think you just have to provide the account number and check number of one of your checks to do that.

So, what can I give back? Well, I can get my act together and start doing some serious blogging again. (It's been an uninspired and busy month, I know.)

But I also can shed a little of my anonymity. Some of you want to know what I look like; well, here's a picture of me and my neighbor's cat, Mr. Peppers.* It's a very sexy pic. But you're only allowed to click on it if you donate. Honor system, guys.

* WARNING: Photo may not actually be of me and Mr. Peppers.

Don't Be Dick Like Spongeworthy: A jackass who wrote:

Just the other day I was thrashing a street urchin with my ebony walking stick and almost $50 fell out of my coat and I was so worn out from beating the little monkey that I just left it on the street! Fortunately another fairly prosperous looking fellow was in the area and was able to scoop up the money before the urchin could crawl over to get it.

...

So, in closing, let's just say "Not this year" and leave it at that, okay? Let's not have an embarassing scene here.

If he had just stopped beating that urchin and grabbed the money, I'd be on easy street, like he is. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (59)
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Having talked to civil-liberties liberals (and conservatives, and libertarians) who questioned the need for vigorous and aggressive police action -- random friskings, etc. -- in high crime neighborhoods, I often rejoined them by noting that freedom is not only diminished by state action, but by private action as well.

Yes, it's true, cops may jack you up in New York City and frisk you. This is a diminishment of your freedom, of your privacy, of your autonomy as a human being.

On the other hand, there are some neighborhoods that are so unsafe and crime-ridden that you are not, in fact, at liberty to walk down them with full autonomy. (There were a lot more of these before Guiliani.) If you voluntarily restrict your behavior -- if you refrain from actions you'd like to take, for fear of being seized against your will-- you've lost some freedom and autonomy. Even if it's muggers and thugs doing the seizing, rather than the cops.

We are told that in America we are free to say what we want, free to protest, free to worship as we like. Is that actualy the case?

The government allows us these rights, but do we actually have them as much as we did just four short months ago? It is not the government restricting our freedoms in this area, but Muslim extremists who threaten, burn, maim and kill in response to our exercising our alleged "rights."

My question to civil libertarians with regard to the police was simple: Freedom is not just freedom from state coercion, but full freedom from all actors, private or official, who would coerce. The calculus is not simply what the government allows you do, but what you are in fact permitted to do by all actors, including governments, corporations, and, yes, criminals.

Focusing only on government restriction on freedom simply misses an important part of the equation.

Important institutions which supposedly protect our right to free speech, and to protest, and to -- yes! -- offend the sensibilities of those of various beliefs and religions, have cravenly caved to the coercion of Muslim extremists and their supposedly "moderate" leadership and lobbying groups which, while weakly denouncing violence and extremism, nevertheless claim that the Muslim faith should be the one faith in all of the free Western world protected from any insult or offense.

The US government hasn't taken this right away from you -- although it certainly did set the tone in not defending a Danish newspaper's right to publish the Mohammad cartoons, insisting that "faiths must be respected."

Free speech means precisely the opposite of this. Free speech demands that all things -- all things -- may, and occasionally must, be shown a great deal of disrespect.

Only a handful of brave newspapers in America have published the cartoons. In this, their European counterparts are clearly more courageous and zealous about the right to free speech, as they've been published far more widely there. And Europeans are the ones facing the greatest wrath from those who would, effectively, mug us in a dark alley and steal away our right to say and argue as we please.

In Muslim lands, all faiths apart from Islam face the official government status of "dhimmitude," or second-class status. There are restrictions on how tall churches may be, how big they may be, when they can operate and the like. Or even how many may be present in an area.

And of course in Muslim lands the Christian -- and especially the Jewish -- faith may be maligned and slandered in the crudest and most vicious of manners.

But in Muslim lands, Islam cannot be offended or insulted. The punishment is quite frequently severe.

Thus, a two-tier system exists: one special privileged position for the Musilm faith, a much lesser status for all other faiths.

In America in 2006, the same two-tier system is now firmly in place.

The government did not directly impose this dhimmitude on America. Rather, the institutions normally most zealous about defending the right to offend have imposed it on us. Instead of standing up to coercion, they gave in to it. They appeased.

They, effectively, accepted Sharia law as regards this issue, and imposed in on the rest of us, through the banning of giving offense to Islam in virtually all of our media.

Feisty had something interesting to say about free speech a few weeks back.

The raison d'etre for free speech is to prevent one idea or one view from being the only idea or view, which thereby prevents some sort of totalitarian non-free existance.

Again, the government itself has not taken this right away. Rather, the media has. Sure, you can, in private conversations or amateur blogs, say what you like. But the major institutions of information and opinion dissemination have submitted to Feisty's "only idea or view" definition of totalitarianism. There is only one permissible take on Islam-- complete respect for it, and abdication to its most zealous believers' rather prickly sensibilities.

Such is America in March, 2006. Those who would scream the loudest if a Christian organiation attempted to suppress their right to offend Christianity have become dhimmis of the transnational Islamist caliphate. There is one strict, "respect"-demanding rule for Allah's faith and very different rule for all other faiths.

As I've said before: It's one thing to actually be conquered militarily and forced, at the point of a knife, to accept a religion you don't believe in. That is simply a fuction of self-presevation. But to accept such a thing as a supposedly free and autonomous people is less than craven. It is disgusting.

More From Cathy Seipp: Booksellers, supposedly dedicated to preserving our right to read what we will, won't carry Oriana Fallacci's anti-Islamist books, saying "We don't carry books by fascists."

They are, however, quite willing to prominently display books by Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill.

The West may be slandered in absurd terms. But Islamists, or even Islam itself, must never be.

Are we as free as we once were?

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 AM | Comments (56)
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Courage is for little people.

As new protests erupt over a deck of playing cards that dared to display a picture of Mecca.

And Jyllends-Posten, which first published the cartoons, now publishes a Manifesto Against Islamism.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (8)
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