Oh no she didn'.

Oh yes she did.

Ann Coulter may have been right: Maybe Hillary would have been a better president than John McCain.

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (20)
Post contains 55 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, turnabout is fair play I guess. If I were oh that jury, I would have voted to get her off too, out of a simple sense of reciprocal obligation.

That's the real headline by the way, yo.

She was accused of kicking a whole in her boyfriend's door and slithering through the hole, like a panther with really big jugs, in order to catch him with another woman.

Hot.

She claimed her breasts were simply too large to make such a scenario feasible.

They measured. She was acquitted.

Also hot.

This picture and caption is really in the story linked:

The defence rests.

Uh-huh. No jury in the world would convict her.

Johnny Cochran would have a field day with this. If she's got big tits, the jury acquits! If she's a double-D, she must go free!

I am so happy to Michael for sending this, just to sort of clear the palate from the D&D post.

The Actual Pic: Hmmm... Would I have acquitted? I dunno. She looks bad, like up to no good. I think I might have voted to lock her away in a penile colony.

Thanks to IreneFingIrene.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (41)
Post contains 209 words, total size 1 kb.

Pardon the joke. But he'd want it that way. Maybe.

It is almost too much to get my mind about. But I've just had news that our dear Dungeon Master has passed away. Ernie called this morning, he thought we should let the fans know. He's just sent an email out.

Gary was in his home when he gathered himself up to cross the great divide.

He was a very dear friend of mine. And I will miss him so.

God Speed My Friend.

Steve

"Ernie" would be his brother Ernie Gygax, who was Bigby or Melf the Elf or one of those gaywad characters that's still hardwired into the game.

The MSM confirms the death.

I'm posting too much D&D crap lately but how could I not note the (possible) passing of the man who taught me to use the pretentiously stuffy academic latinate contractions N.B. and q.v.?

He will be remembered by many geeks of a certain age for helping making long-lasting painful celibacy seem almost hip and cool (almost), and also, sadly, for undermining Israel's ability to defend herself from her enemies.

Thanks to Derek and Double Plus Undead.

Blacksheep:

Geeks everywhere should observe 1d4 + 1 moments of silence.

Gygax was a gaming titan ... or at least a storm giant. God bless.

Which god? Not Blipdoolpoolp I trust. She was like the original, ultimate Butterface.

Well-wishers are asked to send gold pieces and Potions of Super-Heroism to his family in lieu of flowers.

Even Michelle Malkin Notes His Passing. She gives me a shout-out because I brow-beat her into admitting she used to play the game in eighth grade, back on the Hoist the Black Flag show I used to do.

I think she said she really just liked a boy there and was willing to put up with this crap to work on him. Eh, , it still counts.

See-Dub:

Seriously--the vocabulary building for me when I got these books at, like, age 6 was phenomenal. I could never figure out what "misc. magic" meant and I went around telling my friends their gnome had found some "misk magic". Had no idea what that was until I was forced to learn the word "miscellaneous".

You learn scale mapping. Currency conversion. And probability theory--there were graphs of a bell curve in the DMG, I think, explaining why 2d6 gives you different expected results than 1d12.

You learned all kinds of things. Like the, um, picture of the sylph. Apparently women have all sorts of interesting different body parts, including gauzy, diaphanous wings...

Yes, D&D made me the pathetic geek I am today.

Well, yeah, I learned basic probability, but more important was the vocabulary. Gygax wrote with a style that would be called archly pretentious, except it wasn't arch; it was just him. However, yeah, I was exposed to a lot of SAT builder type words just browsing through his defensive explanations of why fighters only got one attack per minute.

And so too, from an early age, I wrote i.e. and e.g. and always knew the difference between them. In law school I had to explain to people the difference. I knew it from seventh grade, because of the Dungeon Masters Guide.

So, sure, I was a virgin until I was 34, but was it worth it?

Oh, hell's yeah.

Oh... And I would be remiss in not noting that Gary Gygax is responsible for the success of this blog.

Three or four days after starting this moronblog, I wrote a piece about what sorts of D&D characters were played by the 2004 Democratic candidates. It got massively linked, including by NRO, which is of course huge traffic. And suddenly I had an audience of thousands of geeks, morons, and sexually-frustrated shut-ins, and life was good enduring.

So really, if I didn't know my way around a d12, this blog never, ever would have gotten any sort of audience. Which may have been a good thing on balance, but I'm happy it worked out.

The Political Angle: As some of you may know, conservative Christians were rather down on D&D during its explosion in the early eighties. The magic, the polytheistic pantheons of gods, the devils, the demons. Etc.

D&D had to bow to pressure and delete the names "Devil" and "Demon" from their products, substituting in something like "Baatzu" and "T'naari,' or something. I don't know. I wasn't playing them. I was an adult and getting laid. (So why the interest now? Well, I'm an adult who passed his prime and so who's not getting laid, and hence old friends like TV, porn, and D&D have come back into my life.)

At any rate, the Jack Chick pamphlet about the Satanic influence of D&D is still kinda funny.

Incidentally... On that score, I hear (hear -- no idea if it's true) that the only reason the "Cleric" with his Holy Symbol and Christian-like aversion to sharp weapons was even included in the game was to appease Gary Gygax's wife, herself a conservative Christian, I guess a little off-put by the black magic and devils. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (112)
Post contains 931 words, total size 6 kb.

This is actually an interesting bit of video. It takes a little while to get to the blowing up part but it does show what our guys go through before they can shoot.

For those of you in offices, there's a very mild content warning for one exclamation of "Bull Shit!"

Sadly, it cuts off before we find out what happens to the second group of terrorists, though my guess is it has a happy ending. As the saying goes, you can run but you'll just die tired.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:22 AM | Comments (32)
Post contains 98 words, total size 1 kb.

Gotta love those CNN photo editors:

The image is hotlinked. If they change it, I've got a cap.

Posted by: Slublog at 09:45 AM | Comments (12)
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

FAAAAAAAKE: I'm not 100% sure, but I think we have our proof.

Compare this "realistic sleeping puppy" to the video, especially at :05 in the vid. DaveP says the head coloring is an exact match.

Thanks, DaveP of Dean's World!!

Although some offered that it was a stuffed animal, it looked too real to me, suggesting it was a dead but real puppy... but... supposedly this stuffed "sleeping puppy" is pretty realistic, and it looks like the "puppy" in question.

Cold Water: Benson says it's not this dog:

Ace, one commenter at Hot Air has the exact same fake dog, and says it's flat on one side and its posture can't be changed. Another has seen them, too, and concurs that they're completely flat on the one side.

Okay, but the principle stands. A realistic dog stuffed animal can probably pass for an unmoving dog.

...

Earlier Post Follows:

Allah says he held off on posting the clip, and then I held off longer.

Story here.

It looks like Iraq; not sure if it is. It doesn't look like Hawaii at all. (He's from Marine Base Corps Hawaii, which I take to just be a designation for an Iraqi base.)

The Beauchamp Brigade will try to blame Bush for turning an upstanding young man into a monster. But much more likely is that this guy was just born a low-grade psychopath lacking basic Voight-Kampff empathy for other living things.

Maj. Chris Perrine of the Marine Corps Base Hawaii says it appears the man is based with a unit in the islands.

Marine officials are calling the YouTube video ``shocking and deplorable'' and say it violates ``the high standard we expect of every Marine.''

The low-quality video shows two Marines joking as one holds up what appears to be a motionless black and white puppy, which he then hurls into a rocky gully.

A yelping sound is heard as it flies through the air.

Hot Air spins a reader's theory that the puppy was already dead and the yelping noises were added post-filming -- so they weren't killing a puppy, but rather just filming a prank of dubious taste -- but I think that's just the sort of (benevolently) kneejerk conservative protectiveness of servicemen at work, plus the (often useful) skepticism of news and video reports.

I think the obvious explanation will prove to be accurate: Yup, he killed a puppy for no good reason.

I can't tell myself. The puppy doesn't seem to move, but that's not very probative either way; grabbed by the back of the neck, the puppy would probably go into a slack submissive state. Its lower legs don't hang but are rather pulled up by its body, which also doesn't mean much, as that could just be rigor mortis.

I hope Allah's reader is right, but I doubt it. Either way, the video doesn't really establish much except for what we already knew: There are are a lot of assholes in the world, and some of them even wear a uniform.

Emerging Commenter Consensus: FAKE. I hope so, and I do think there is some merit to the arguments, which I guess are, in order of increasing persuasiveness:

1) The comportment of the guys seems like they're doing a shock-video for shits and giggles, a prank. Ambiguous, of course, but I can see that.

2) The puppy doesn't move. Even when thrown, his legs do not flail. Also ambiguous, because the puppy is spun-out and centrifugal forces might just be keeping his legs extended. In any event, it's hard to really be sure he's not moving voluntarily, since he's involuntarily moving so damn much.

3) The yelps seems strangely loud even as the puppy fades into the background, suggesting they were not recorded in-scene but added later. This seems to be the strongest evidence, but it's still not overwhelming. The yelps do fade some, and I personally don't know enough about audio to know what the proper drop-off in decibel level should be as something moves 40 feet away.

Still... there is some good reason to doubt the video, and think it is all just a prank. (PS, if it is a prank, let us have none of this "Well they're so sick they still shouldn't wear the uniform!" crap. True, this is a PR black-eye, but if it is just a prank, well, it's just a prank, and no one should suffer greatly just for pulling a prank of dubious taste.)

All that said, I still think the obvious explanation will hold true. I'm just not certain of it.

Watching Again: I have moved to the "Prank" side of the aisle, though I'm not firm on that. But now I think more likely fake than real.

It's the way they act. They are acting like it's a joke and that they're putting one over on us. And add in the fact the puppy never moves at all and yes, those far-away yelps are quite suspicious... Fake.

Expected reaction from the other guy if Vittoro (sp?) actually threw the puppy: That sort of guilty, horrified laughing. Like, "Duuudde! No! I can't believe you did that!" With laughs, if the guy was into puppy-murder.

His actual reaction (the spirit of it, at least): "Look, everyone, he just killed a cute little puppy, that's cold, isn't it?" It seems less like he's reacting to the puppy murder and more like he's trying to sell it to the home audience.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (219)
Post contains 951 words, total size 6 kb.

We shouldn't fall into the Curveball trap of believing intelligence sources who may be running a disinformation game against us, but this is definitely serious.

Colombia said on Tuesday that FARC rebels had been planning to make a "dirty bomb" with radioactive material, threatening the entire Latin American region.

The charges by Vice-President Francisco Santos, at the United Nations-sponsored Conference on Disarmament, marked a dramatic turn in a regional crisis that has seen Venezuela and Ecuador cut diplomatic ties with Colombia.

Bogota has already accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of funding the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, after Colombian forces crossed into Ecuador and killed a senior rebel commander on Saturday, sparking troop movements and warnings of war.

"Just yesterday (Monday) our national police submitted an initial report regarding the content of two computers found with Raul Reyes, second in command of FARC, who was killed last Saturday," Santos said.

They contained "information from one commander to another indicating that FARC was apparently negotiating for radioactive material, the primary basis for generating dirty weapons of mass destruction and terrorism," he added.

Given the IAEA/Iran fiasco, my faith in "captured enemy laptops" isn't terribly high.

But.

Bonus: Three hundred million from Chavez to fund FARC terrorists, Colombia also claims.

Not sure if this is legit or Colombia, understandably, is gaming us because they'd like a little American Death From Above.

It's obviously very plausible, but that's not the same as actually true.

PS: Regarding Iran, seems we got our hands on a new defector's laptop which contradicts everything we found on that last one we "captured."

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (11)
Post contains 285 words, total size 2 kb.

Damn it. As I've said before, I understand the "I want to go out on top" impulse, but I really respect those guys who so love the game they just want to keep on playing, despite the ravages of age and declining abilities.

I guess he pushed it, and he knows best for himself and his family. But I'd share more of John Madden's man-love for Country Time if he'd stayed on a couple of more years, battling like an old lion.

The most storied quarterback career in NFL history is coming to a close.

FOXSports.com has learned that legendary quarterback Brett Favre has decided to retire. In fact, it's believed he informed the Packers of his decision within the last few days, although it's unclear when Favre and the team will make his decision known.

So barring an unforeseen last-minute change of heart, Favre will leave the game after 17 years, during which he built himself into a household name and a figure synonymous with grit, toughness and perseverance.

Neither GM Ted Thompson nor head coach Mike McCarthy returned several calls left by FOXSports.com for confirmation.

After flirting with retirement for the last few years, Favre will finally go out on the heels of one of the best seasons of his career.

He led the Packers to the NFC Championship Game after passing for a stunning 4,155 yards, looking very much at times like a younger version of himself. In addition he threw 28 TDs — including an overtime Hail Mary pass to beat Denver in front of a national audience — and had a 95.7 quarterback rating. He was also voted into the Pro Bowl following the 2007 season but declined to go.

Favre leaves the game as the all-time record holder in several categories including wins, passing yards, touchdowns and consecutive games started. A three-time MVP, The southern swashbuckler won fans over with his carefree style that epitomized the "gunslinger" moniker and made fans out of everyone from the guy next door to those already enshrined in Canton.

If in fact, Favre does not have a change of heart, his final pass of a Hall of Fame Career was an interception by the Giants' Corey Webster, setting up New York's overtime win in the NFC title game.

It's that last thing that gives me some hope for the change of heart. As many commentators noted, Brett Favre doesn't want to go out with that ill-advised chuck being his last pass. Perhaps he's reacting over-emotionally to it, seeing it as a sign he's spent.

But then, he always threw a lot of goofball interceptions; he leads the league all-time in that category. It was the way he played. Crafty, reckless, tough, determined, free-wheeling, and fucking moronic.

He was like the Tin Cup of football, really. His occasional reckless retarded abandon is what made him human.

Posted by: Ace at 08:13 AM | Comments (29)
Post contains 485 words, total size 3 kb.

Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

I don't mean that -- not really -- but it seems apropos.

After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

The youth prison wing of the Iraqi police compound in Baghdad. Many young people have taken part in IraqÂ’s sectarian violence.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

...

Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion.

“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”

“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”

“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”

Read the whole thing.

Islamism seems, thankfully, self-limiting; it's great at promoting itself, but once the Islamists actually take over, they quickly turn everyone into anti-Islamists.

Caution: Bear in mind the most elemental sort of media bias: The reporter's determination to find a capital-T Trend in everyfuckingthing; otherwise she doesn't have a story, she only has scattered anecdotes which mean nothing at all.

Posted by: Ace at 07:01 AM | Comments (18)
Post contains 461 words, total size 3 kb.

He makes a good case. One time, at band camp?

Thanks to Bruce.

Posted by: Ace at 06:48 AM | Comments (53)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.