Which Movie Villian Are You?

My Daughters Knock-Knock Joke Template

My 3 year old daughter, Katia, has evolved a knock-knock joke template that she has been using for the past 24 hours. It goes something like this Katia: Knock! Knock!
Victim: Who's there?
Katia: Doggie!
Victim: Doggie who?
Katia: Poopy Doggie! *Ha* *Ha* *Ha*
Now for the template: Katia: Knock! Knock!
Victim: Who's there?
Katia: ${word}
Victim: ${word} who?
Katia: Poopy ${word} *Ha* *Ha* *Ha*
I was thinking of writing a little script that randomly generated one of Katia's knock-knock jokes from /usr/dict/words. Might be a good project for this evening.

Sorry Please Ignore dis....

jetBlue

My first flight on jetBlue was a quick up and down jaunt to Rochester, NY. If you've never been aboard a jetBlue flight give it a try. It's interesting how they keep their planes in the air by very quick turnaround at the gate. I've never seen anything like it on other airlines. On the way home I was still in the back of the plane waiting for the rest of the folks to disembark while the ground crew had the plane fueled up, unpacked, and they were loading the luggage hold up with the bags of the passengers on the next flight. I guess someone figured out that a plane on the ground doesn't make any money. I guess they also figured out that people like wider leather seats too.

JetBlue free WiFi

I'm in the JetBlue terminal at JFK tapping into their free WiFi. Thankyou JetBlue! You're making my trip to Rochester, NY a bit more bearable. Are any other airlines listening?

Perspective

It's amazing how a short walk up a big hill can give you some perspective. A quick hike up to Chasm Lake on the Long's Peak Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park. Total elevation about 10,500 feet. For a guy who spends his life a sea level the air is pretty thin up there. The round trip was about 7 miles with about a 2000 foot elevation gain. If there is a god, this is his/her/it's country.

How true.

In Our Name

If Seymour Hirsh has this this story correct, then the abuses at Abu Ghraib are a result of the loosening of restrictions on interrigation, detention, and general rules of combat, approved by Rumsfeld, to get quicker intelligence results in Iraq. An idiot can tell we are in trouble in Iraq. Apparently, the adminstration wanted to "step on the gas" and get things moving in Iraq with rules made for Afganistan. I think it shows how little folks like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, an yes Bush, really understand about this War on Terror. This war, waged in our name, is out of control and their hamfisted attempts to assert order are undermining the fight against against the real problem, Al Qaeda.

It's like a nightmare. As we are still reeling from the sickening behavior of American troops guarding prisoners in Iraq. Nick Berg is brutally executed in front of a video camera. I am deeply saddened and disturbed by this event and my heart goes out to his family. Another act of brutality heaped upon more brutality in the region. When will it end? Some of you, like our misguided president, may argue that Iraq was way more violent before we showed up and that the Iraqi people are much better off today then they were before the invasion. I think your wrong. Going into Iraq just destabilized that part of the world even more and our actions, even before Abu Ghraib, just fanned the flames of hatred against us. We made things worse. Had we waited out Saddam and not rode into Iraq like the 7th Calvary maybe we might have had a chance. I just hope it's not another Little Big Horn in the making.

I normally despise Bill O'Reilly. But I was pleasantly surprised by this transcript of an interview with Seymour Hersh about his article on Abu Ghraib. It is amazingly civil and even O'Reilly can't spin this story. I'm sure no one with a conscience, or a brain in their head, can spin this story. I know one thing if the conservative airwaves are filled with this kind of talk then the administration is in real trouble.

I guess in response to my earlier lament about the abuses at Abu Ghraib:

The world is outraged because some of our troops embarresed some Iraqi pisioners. These are the same people that kill American tourists and troops celebrating while they drag their bodies through the streets,the same ones who hate America so they feel good when they blow up our buildings and aircraft. The same people we send aid to and rebuild their country. I am not the least bit embarressed by the actions of Pfc. Lynndie England, try to remember while she was embarrsing a few of the captives their comrads are out looking for hostages and ambushing convoys, killing civilians while our troops die trying to help them. Give her your support,don't let the world constantly tell the US what we do wrong while they do whatever they want to our people.These people hate us and do not think any American has the right to live,they do not deserve our sympathy.

The writer of this email is exemplary of the people in this country who fail to see that what happened can not be excused. The people at Abu Gharib did not fly planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11. They did not bomb the Cole. They may have been resisting the American occupation of Iraq. They may have planted car bombs in Iraq. I do not condone what they may have done to land in Abu Gharib. No one wants to see American soldiers suffering over there. They are doing their job and they deserve our support. However, the guards at Abu Gharib crossed a line. They ceased being moral soldiers in a war and became inhuman monsters. They abused their power to remove the dignity of these prisoners all in the name of extracting information from them. Pfc. Lynndie England, and the other alleged perpetrators of these crimes, don't deserve anyone's support. They must be brought before a military court and have her case heard. If they are found guilty they should be punished to the full extent of military law. I imagine there are many people in this country, like the author of the email, who don't have a clue about the impact of these events. They have no idea the damage this has caused or the shame we should all feel. America is not a country of monsters. We are not barbarians. We aim to live by high ideals and when any group within our nation fails to live up to those ideals we all suffer. The world suffers.

I think I'm not the first one to notice that my RSS feed now has more hits than my home page. When I started paying attention to the stats in September of 2003 my RSS feed was somewhere around the number ten spot on top downloaded URLs. Now it's number one. I find it kind of interesting that this syndication thing is getting bigger. It seems like it's about to burst. I mean even companies like Sun are jumping on the bandwagon. I shouldn't really be surprised. I exclusively read all my favorite blogs via Bloglines. I guess I could get more functionality out of reading blogs with a local, non-web, aggregator but Bloglines is just so damn convenient. I want everything I use to work remotely on the net. Well, let me rephrase that. I want everything I do with a computer to be usable from the net maybe with some local caching here on my laptop for times that I'm not on line. It's just more liberating not being tied to a particular piece of hardware, not to mention tied to a particular operating system. This isn't a new idea. It was the idea that made Netscape so dangerous. Imagine a world where what operating system or hardware you were running didn't matter. All you needed was bandwidth and a good browser. No wonder Microsoft turned their boat so fast. They would have been dead had they not jumped in to embrace and extend the market into submission.

I've been outraged at the reports of the atrocities committed by U.S troops at Abu Ghraib prison. I don't think "atrocities" is too strong a word. I've also been reluctant to tune in to hear the inevitable cacophony of right vs. left rhetoric spewing from the cable news networks. These acts cannot be justified or rationalized in any way. There can be no debate. Our army has shamed the nation and has helped further unwind the thread-bare mantle of righteousness our leaders have wrapped themselves in to justify our petulant unilateral actions. I am sure the perpetrators will be punished but the damage can not be repaired. The disgusting snapshots of U.S. troops abusing prisoners will be the lasting images from this war. It's serendipitous that I've been listening to this year's BBC Reith Lecture given by Wole Soyinka on the current Climate of Fear gripping the world. The fourth lecture, A Quest for Dignity, is particularly relevant to the torture of prisoners at Abu Gharib. Who can look at those images and not see how the soldiers there were robbing these prisoners of their dignity. How can we expect the Muslim world to view us as the grinning immoral monsters captured on film presiding over the torture of helpless prisoners. Regardless of the tactical and strategic outcome, we have lost the war in Iraq.