Jon in Pasadena

Thank you, Tom, for letting us know. I suspected something might be amiss. Paul and I had just recently started up an email dialogue and I truly enjoyed our brief interaction. He was always extremely courteous to me in our exchanges. I was looking forward to meeting him in person, some day. Damn.

I prefer to phrase it as "The average person is much stupider than a crap-throwing monkey".

They have their genetic future incorporated in their pets?

Wow, they hated Krumrie so much, they released him twice!

You're one perceptive beatnik. I've never met CTM but from posting history alone, I've always envisioned him as being similar in many ways to the calsci football guy. It would be fun to see the two of them in an argument. Now that would be a nerd-slapfest of Tri-Lambdian proportions.

Hey! I was at a bar watching the game yesterday with 5 or 6 other Sabres fans! And I'm gonna be there again today, and this time KTFBD is gonna be there too! So there!

I know the guy who runs that site. Smart dude. Interpersonal skills somewhat lacking, however.

Maybe I'm just an !@#$, but the first thing I thought of when I read the article was that if a terrorist group was really on the ball, they would have had a golden opportunity to cause some mayhem last weekend after all the 9-1-1 operators were presumably briefed to ignore calls about mysterious electronic "six inch long, two-and-a-half inch wide red plastic boxes -- connected to activator switches on the news rack doors". Yeah, I know, the word "Maybe" was redundant in that sentence.

Thomas is gone.

Who dreams up this crap? I especially love the last sentence.

Kjhjskri is a very difficult language.

Why, it's right here: smack in the middle of the 'Zarks Don't think they have the population base to support an NFL team, though. Unless ghosts like football.

Where you gonna play her? Tight End or Defensive End?

As the husband of a LEGAL immigrant, who was made to jump through innumerable hoops in order to obtain her green card, here's how I'll feel if amnesty is granted to illegal immigrants: like the bulldog in those old Tom and Jerry cartoons, where he sees a thought bubble of himself transmogrifying into an ass (donkey). We did everything by the book, spent uncountable hours waiting in line at INS, drove downtown multiple times at 4:00 a.m. to be sure and get there in time to get processed before the hard-working bureaucrats took their mid-morning/cigarette/coffee/bathroom/lunch/telephone-breaks, etc., and they still left us dangling for nearly three YEARS before finally issuing the permanent resident card. I will also mention that the fact that my wife is NOT hispanic meant that we were repeatedly shafted during our encounters with L.A.'s INS offices. Announcements given only in Spanish, preferential treatment/scheduling given to spanish-speakers who cut the lines and had rapid-fire exchanges with the (coincidentally?) spanish-speaking clerks, having our application forms mysteriously "disappear" only to be magically found after all the other (spanish-speaking) applicants got processed, and on and on. All of which we gritted our teeth and endured. But if it turns out that all we had to do was breed a lot and loudly complain about racism, then we really missed out on some fun times by wasting all that time and money playing fair. And IF that turns out to be the case, well maybe I ought to smarten up and start ignoring whatever laws might cramp my style in future.

Sure. The Polk was one of our SSNB's (Polaris/Poseidon missile subs)

Non-proliferation goes the way of the Dodo

750K doesn't get you all that much house out here.

Gee, thanks! (That was actually pretty funny! ) Come to think of it, I have some (second-hand) stories about Carlos, too...

I sent you a PM.

Like others have said, it depends on what kind of cry it is (not much you can do for colic; usually it fixes itself), but if you suspect that's she's getting hungry more often than you'd like, here's a little trick we learned from our first. My son would start to doze off mid-way through his feeding only to wake up 1.5 hours later all hungry and start crying again. Once we started nudging him to stay awake throughout the whole feeding (mid-feeding burp helps a lot for this) he could take 50-75% more milk, and sleep an extra hour or two at a stretch. Saved our sanity. (Well, my wife's anyway; "Forward Lateral" had pretty much 86'd mine a few years prior. )

With the lights turned kinda low, you could make a case for her working out your Britney Spears fantasies. Not that I have any. I'm just saying.

Has anyone here ever checked out these guys to get some simple legal documents drawn up? Supposedly your documents are prepared by, or at least under the supervision of, licensed attorneys. (Disclaimer: the only on-line law-related service I've ever used was an on-line traffic school -- what a friggin' hilarious mockery of justice that was. )

While I am right there with you in your disdain for the radical Islamists and their !@#$ed up world-view, you should know that, although power-hungry, evil and, in many cases, quite nuts, most of the powerful ruling clerics are not retarded in the ordinary sense (in another sense, like socially, yes they probably are); but they've been immersed in an evil brain-washing program since birth. They are well aware of the consequences of an Israeli or American first-strike. Some of those consequences would be to convince even more Muslims that the Islamists were right all along in their characterization of the West as seeking the destruction of Islam, hence bringing even more people under the sway of the most violent and regressive leaders. The Iraqi insurgency IMHO has emboldened them immensely by providing a working model of a way to successfully prosecute a modern war of attrition against the Western powers (mainly us & UK)

For what it's worth, I was talking to an Iranian friend of mine who recently came back from a lengthy visit, and she told me a couple of interesting things about the current regime. According to her: Most of the middle class of Iranian society view Ahmadinejad as a blustery fool. They usually refer to him by a rather undignified nickname. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Iranians who are not in the middle class. He has a big following in the Revolutionary Guards. Ahmadinejad is, apparently, a "true believer" who really thinks that the Mahdi is coming in two years. (I liken it to having someone like Pat Robertson elected president.) If left to his own devices, he *might* try to actualize some of his loonier fundamentalist beliefs, but remember that under the insanely convoluted Iranian political system, he really doesn't have all that much power. If he goes too far, there is a good chance he'll get smacked down by the mullahs who hold the real power. My take: The mullahs stand to benefit by anything that seems to increase the importance and relevance of Islam in the world. On the other hand, they risk losing stature whenever the Islamic world suffers any kind of large setback, so they are relatively cautious about moving openly, until they are positive they have a winning hand. On the other other hand, they are also playing the game within a game, vis-a-vis their Sunni neighbors. I think right now they are allowing Ahmadinejad to run his mouth in order to gauge the West's reaction. If we make concessions, they'll let him keep upping the ante. If they ever think they're losing face because of their President's rhetoric, they'll dump his ass and replace him with another goober. I'm still waiting to hear what they need all that heavy water for, that's being produced at Isfahan*. It's not like they can use it in Bushehr. *Whoops, brain-fart; I meant Arak. Isfahan is where they're gonna be making metallic Uranium. (Gee I wonder what that could be used for. )

Royal Air Maroc ain't bad. No pork in Islamarchycracies.