Blow on the tube, baby:

- He fits in a car's glove box, appears at a flick of a switch and when a woman has finished using him, she can just pull the plug and he deflates.

He's the "Buddy on Demand," a blow-up man launched on Tuesday with the aim of making solo female motorists feel less nervous about driving at night.

...

"We're not saying that an inflatable man is the only answer but we do hope it will give women extra confidence and make journeys in the dark less fearful," said Jacky Brown, the spokeswoman for Sheilas' Wheels.

Plus, he's hung like a friggin' Wookie.

Via Wardrobe Door.

Correction: Gordon reminds me it's OTTO from Airplane, not Otis, as I wrote.

For some reason, when I was a kid, we would call scarecrow-type fake people -- clothes stuffed with newspaper and stuff, like you put out at Halloween, with a fake head -- "Otises," which I think came from some 1970's movie I can't remember now.

Anyway, Otto/Otis, that's why I have that confusion.

Anyone remember what movie had kids calling their manikin-man an "Otis"? Or was that just something they called it my hometown?

Posted by: Ace at 06:41 AM | Comments (38)
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It's a nearly five minute tribute leaving nary a wet eye in the house.

Shorter eulogy: He left the world a better place, simply by departing from it.

Thanks to CraigC.

Posted by: Ace at 05:57 AM | Comments (5)
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Sticky.

Instapundit has linked my main page on the Greenwald sock-puppet/lying story, but most of the Greenwald stuff isn't here. Here are the key links in this story:

Shawn started the ball rolling by noting that many of Glenn Greenwald's on-line defenders seemed to use very similar language, causing suspicion that these fake internet posters, or "sock-puppets," were actually Glenn Greenwald himself.

A poster calling himself "Ellison," defending Greenwald on this site, is found, conclusively, to have the same IP as Glenn Greenwald himself, posting on Patterico's site. (Note: This article is written humorously, and is very long, because half of it is jokes. A briefer digest is available at Patterico's, if you just want to get to the point. Read Patterico for the digest, read me for the jokes.)

Then more sock-puppets -- "Thomas Ellers," "Ryan," and "Wilson" -- were discovered on other websites, all somehow using Greenwald's IP address (i.e., the specific internet address identifying your computer on the internet network).

Greenwald denies with a vague insinuation his "Magic Boyfriend" is obsessively trolling rightwing sites defending him under assumed names.

Another sock-puppet discovered, again obsessively defending Glenn Greenwald, this time under the name "Rick Ellensburg." Worse yet, "Rick Ellensburg" is shown to use many of the same tics in writing style as Glenn Greenwald. (And of course he shares Greenwald's IP as well.)

Even worse-- the final nail in the coffin. While the previous post demonstrated "Rick Ellensburg" regurgitating Glenn Greenwald's arguments, in his writing style, a closer examination shows he also PREgurgitates Glenn Greenwald's arguments, writing comments very similar to Glenn Greenwald posts the day before Glenn Greenwald actually writes them on his blog.

Additional similarities in the writing style of Glenn Greenwald and his sock-puppets discovered, further undermining the already-preposterous claim that it is his "Magic Boyfriend" writing these posts.

Note: The timestamp of this post has been manually manipulated to keep it at the top of the blog, as the "latest" post, as Instapundit is directing traffic to the front page of this blog.

It's been made "sticky." I don't know how to do that other than to set the timestamp ahead by several hours.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 PM | Comments (33)
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I will not speculate as to who, but I have the IP, all the screen-caps of the screens involved, and we'll sort out what's what tomorrow.

Thanks for alerting me to this, Topsecretko and David.

This gentleman posted the guy's address, phone number, and mother's maiden name.

Well, okay, buddy. We'll see. We'll see.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 PM | Comments (26)
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I went overboard on GG coverage the first few days.

I have corrected that.

I posted about all sorts of different things today, including a funny top ten list.

I had to scramble because Instapundit linked my main page on the Glenn Greenwald story, and there was nothing obvious for those thousands of potential new readers to read. So I quickly cobbled together a quick recap, so that the thousands of new people would actually be able to read the story they came here for.

And yet the bitching does not end. If some of you think it's funny, trust me, it's not at this point. I am getting extremely tired of it.

What did you do in pre-Glenn Greenwald days, when I posted a story you weren't interested in, I wonder? Did you manage to successfully operate that scroll-bar and roll right on past the story? Did you maybe check out another blog to see if they were writing something more to your liking?

Please tell me why those formerly useful procedures are apparently no longer possible for you, eh?

This has to be fun for me, too, guys. I am not your frigging dancing monkey here 15 hours a day to amuse you. I get to amuse myself, too. And I do it in hopes that one day it will lead to something better than shit money making dick-jokes and calling Keith Olbermann a douche.

Yes, this is a job of sorts, but it is a job that pays below minimum fucking wage. So keep that in goddamned mind the next time you get in your head to endlessly criticize someone providing you with free fucking entertainment every day of the week.

Gee, when's the last time I had a vacation that lasted more than two days?

You guys get vacations, right?

Well consider this week, and maybe next, mine.

Update: Let me address past criticisms and future criticisms of my coverage on this story in one swoop.

You posted too much on this in the first couple of days.

Yes, I did. And did you notice? I corrected that today. And, in case you're keeping track, this story broke here late Wednesday night-- Thursday morning for most of you. So this isn't exactly a long-running story.

I'm not interested in this story.

Well I am. How ya like them apples?

I'm sick of seeing the name "Glenn Greenwald."

Almost as much as I am. I have a suggestion for you: scrollbar. I have another possible option: enjoy one of the many fine blogs advertised in the blogroll.

I cannot possibly bear to read a site that mentions Glenn Greenwald even once or twice a day, or, as the story cools, once or twice a week.

Then I'm afraid you and I will have to part company. Although coverage already has diminished, and will diminish still, there will be occasional updates on this site about it. If you can't handle that, again, I invite you to sample some of the many other fine blogs available on the Internet.

Or, better still, open an account at www.blogger.com and start your own blog. You can fill a blog with nothing except stuff you're interested in. One catch-- you have to write it yourself.

Did I mention I really want you stop writing about this story entirely?

Long story short: I don't give a shit. See suggestion above.

Posted by: Ace at 05:27 PM | Comments (432)
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Are they sure they entered her in the right category? Is there a Nobel Prize for Inciting Political Assassinations? Because, you know, I think this nice lady would be a lock.

NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.

Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.

"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.

"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.

Take note: threatening murder and inciting political assassinations is now, per MSM terminology, just exhibiting a "feisty Irish spirit."

Now, if I were to suggest that something untoward should happen to this woman, I wonder if I, too, would be said to be showing my own "feisty Irish spirit?"

I think not. Violence, murder, and political assassination is only "cute" when suggested by leftwing bastards and twats.

Check out this bullshit:

"My job is to tell you their stories," Ms Williams said of a recent trip to Iraq.

"We went to a hospital where there were 200 children; they were beautiful, all of them, but they had cancers that the doctors couldn't even recognise. From the first Gulf War, the mothers' wombs were infected.

"As I was leaving the hospital, I said to the doctor, 'How many of these babies do you think are going to live?'

"He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'None, not one'. They needed five different kinds of medication to treat the cancers that the children had, and the embargoes laid on by the United States and the United Nations only allowed them three."

Right. Embargo on Iraq. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

You lying, vicious bitch.

More here.

Via The Digital Brownshirt.

And if you're not convinced the entire left consists of nothing but deranged, vicious liars endlessly promoted by the MSM, read this-- the sad story of a deranged man ranting about Bush on NPR, while claiming he has a Congressional Medal of Honor.

You'll. Never. Guess. What. The. Punchline. Is.

Yeah. NPR. Multiple layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 04:17 PM | Comments (32)
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I don't even know what the hell this is.

Steely Dan -- the band, yeah, they've got a blog -- write an open letter to Luke Wilson, accusing his brother, Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson, of stealing the idea for the new movie You Me and Dupree from their song "Cousin Dupree."

It is written in the chattiest, long-windiest, bong-resin-smelliest sort of rambling way it takes forever to get to the accusation. I'm not even sure, exactly, what the accusation is, or if they're serious.

Weird, wild stuff.

Thanks to yls.

Viral Marketing? When the Morgellon's Disease hallucination was going around the Internet, Steven den Beste suggested it was viral marketing for A Scanner Darkly. I didn't buy that, because too many people seemed in on the conspiracy, and I had trouble believing that Hollywood would stoop so low as to create a public-health scare to pimp a movie.

And I saw the movie (which is an advantage den Beste didn't have at the time) and it's not about Morgellon's Disease, or anything faintly resembling Morgellon's Disease. In fact, it's not about anything at all. I can't even bring myself to write a review, except to maybe say: Shit sandwich.

Anyway, it seems Steely Dan and Luke Wilson know each other, so perhaps the brothers Wilson and Dan and Walt cooked up this goofy scheme while getting really, really, really fucking high.

Because they'd have to be. It's too stupid to possibly be anything but genuinely, stupidly on the level.

But... still. There is that question. Have I been chumped as badly as one of Glenn Greenwald's cultists?

Posted by: Ace at 03:40 PM | Comments (18)
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Who?

Why, everyone's favorite Karl-Rove-Indictment scooper, Jason Leopold of Truth Out.

Now, I am linking this stuff blind because I haven't read it all yet. But from what I've skimmed, it is compelling. And rich.

It begins.

It continues, this time with obviously falsified emails as evidence Seixon is "threatening" Leopold.

Let me say right off that I do not know Seixon, and have heard of his blog, but never read it. (Please, no accusations of lying.) So I do not have any real basis upon which to judge his credibility vis a vis Jason Leopold's.

Except that Jason Leopold lied about who he was when attempting to get a source to talk.

Which is, I don't know, not the worst deception in the world I can imagine.

However. Let me ask you. Do you for one instant believe that anyone would write threats like this? Or that someone would flat out say stuff like, "I am going to lie about you, and I'll get my buddies at National Review to back me up"?

Who announces in an email "I INTEND TO LIE ABOUT YOU"?!

These emails are supposedly from Seixon, threatening Leopold, and disclosed by Leopold... but they seem to have been, let us say, juiced up a tad:

Your choice. I will make up stuff about you and your family. If you do not admit to me that Larry Johnson was your source I will make up things about you and post it on my blog. I will smear you until you commit suicide. I plan to destroy VIPS and I will do it with or without your help.

Bold indicates falsified portion of email.

Or:

Blackmail? [Written as a question after Leopold accuses him of such.] YouÂ’re damn right itÂ’s blackmail. Johnson must be stopped and youÂ’re the target. I will take you down and I will have the National Review back me up.

Again, bold indicates falsified part of email. Brackets indicate my addition, for clarity. (Duh.)

Hat-tip to "Ellison," my new star tipster, who writes to say, "Hey, here's something juicy, now why don't you lay off that best-selling author Glenn Greenwald for a spell?"

PS: Thank you, Instapundit, for linking me tonight. Please be aware, however, that if I do not continue receiving one (1) link per day, I intend to make stuff up about you and your family, and I will destroy your blog and drive you to commit suicide, and I will have my gang-stars at NRO back me up, like Jonah "J-Slice" Goldberg, and Ramesh "RamPo" Ponnuru, and Andrew Stuttaford.*

* No nickname for him. I think he's English, and so is, therefore, kind of just a pussy. He'll bring a picnic lunch for the other guys, though, so they can have a nice snack after they're done pimp-stompin' ya, Yo!

PS: Andrew Stuttaford is English, but not a pussy.

Please don't kick my ass.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (30)
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Cory sends this picture and writes:

This was, at one point, a M1114 “Up-Armored” HMMWV in Iraq. It is now armored swiss cheese. 3 of the passengers in that truck are dead. How? We call them Explosively Formed Projectiles, or EFPs. The more familiar term is a “shaped charge.” It requires a decent amount of technical know-how to create a functioning homemade EFP.

Hizbollah used these frequently, starting during the 80s. About a year and a half ago, Hizbollah explosives experts began showing up in Iraq, training the insurgents on how to make them.

These types of IEDs cause a significant portion of the IED-related casualties in Iraq – the blood of our soldiers, serving right now, is already on Hizbollah’s collective hands. This is a picture of the biggest threat, right now, to a soldier’s life in Iraq.

I didn't find a cite to Hezbollah bomb-experts helping insurgets build bombs in Iraq, but I have found a NYT piece quoted by DefenseTech about Hezbollah's sponsor, Iran, doing so, and the article notes the shaped-charges closely match those used by Hezbollah:

- Many of the new, more sophisticated roadside bombs used to attack American and government forces in Iraq have been designed in Iran and shipped in from there, United States military and intelligence officials said Friday, raising the prospect of increased foreign help for Iraqi insurgents.

American commanders say the deadlier bombs could become more common as insurgent bomb makers learn the techniques to make the weapons themselves in Iraq.

...

Unlike the improvised explosive devices devised from Iraq's vast stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells and other arms, the new weapons are specially designed to destroy armored vehicles, military bomb experts say. The bombs feature shaped charges, which penetrate armor by focusing explosive power in a single direction and by firing a metal projectile embedded in the device into the target at high speed. The design is crude but effective if the vehicle's armor plating is struck at the correct angle, the experts said.

Since they first began appearing about two months ago, some of these devices have been seized, including one large shipment that was captured last week in northeast Iraq coming from Iran. But one senior military officer said "tens" of the devices had been smuggled in and used against allied forces, killing or wounding several Americans throughout Iraq in the past several weeks.

"These are among the most sophisticated and most lethal devices we've seen," said the senior officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate intelligence reports describing the bombs. "It's very serious."

Pentagon and intelligence officials say that some shipments of the new explosives have contained both components and fully manufactured devices, and may have been spirited into Iraq along the porous Iranian border by the Iranian-backed, anti-Israeli terrorist group Hezbollah, or by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. American commanders say these bombs closely matched those that Hezbollah has used against Israel.

The article is from August of last year.

Note: Originally I found the NYT article, and linked it. Then I saw DefenseTech had extensively quoted the article. So I linked DefenseTech instead.

Another rule of blogger etiqutte: Never link the NYT if it can possibly be avoided.

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (8)
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Those ostentatious ivory-handled .45's weren't just for show.

Correction: I wrote "pearl-handled," which I'm reliably informed only a cheap pimp would carry. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (23)
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