October 19, 2003
Who's Your Baghdaddy?
Advantage, Burger King!
- Part creature comfort, part therapy for homesick troops, its sales have reached the top 10 among all Burger King franchises on Earth in the five months since it opened. The shiny metal broiler spits out 5,000 patties a day.
October 18, 2003
What's Wrong With Loans?
I have to say that I agree with Spoons. I found this arguement particularly persuasive.
- The best reason I see for making all aid to Iraq an outright gift is that Iraq is already saddled with enormous debt. ...most of this debt is owed to countries like France, Germany, and Russia... Are these countries lining up to forgive any of these "crushing" Iraqi debts? Of course not. And yet, we're supposed to just give Iraq tens of billions of additional dollars, while the countries that propped up Saddam's oppressive regime get paid in full? I dunno. Perhaps that's medicine we just need to take, but it strikes me as an awfully hard pill to swallow. If someone came up with a plan that says we won't demand any repayment from Iraq, as long as Russia, France, and Germany forgive a proportionate amount of debt as well, I'd be all for it.
October 17, 2003
Wake Up, NYT!
Today's NY Times:
- President Bush is under pressure to deliver a safer, more democratic Iraq by the time he faces re-election next fall.
Gee, I guess removing that old killer Saddam and establishing the first Arab nation with a free press doesn't count for anything?
Face it, NY Times: most of the 'dangers' in Iraq are a product of your own imagination, not of reality. And if the diehards decide to keep blowing themselves up in cars, then I guess we'll get to determine how true this is.
October 15, 2003
Popeye the Inflamed Christmas Tree
Courtesy of Bluto's Revenge. Click on "Popeye" for a rather impressive video.
Andy Rooney: Long Past His Prime
Jeff Jarvis, fisking Andy Rooney:
Andy Roony sez:
I wish President Bush would try to make this country less hated. He could do it if he set his mind to it. To begin with, we should change our attitude toward the United Nations. There has to be some power in the world superior to our own - for our own sake.
You want there to be some power superior to our own? Well, try being really, really nice and pretty soon, Osama bin Laden will be a power superior to ours. The U.N. as a superior power? Pardon me, I have to stop typing now; my palms are sweating at the thought and I'm afraid I'll short out the laptop. I'm not a U.N. paranoid; I believe the U.N., properly run, has a role in the world to help mediate disputes. But as superior power? No, thank you. That's a frightening prospect. That's the EU-ification of the world.
...
Andy Roony sez:I was opposed to going into Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Things went well at first and I decided I was wrong and apologized. Now I want to apologize again. I want to apologize for apologizing.
Whew. Can you instead just apologize for taking up air and airwaves?
Andy Roony sez:
- We should not have attacked Iraq without the OK of the United Nations. It wasn't all President Bush's fault. U.N. delegates were infuriating - sitting on their hands. It's an ineffective, namby-pamby organization. The French and the Germans were against attacking Iraq because they do a lot of business there.
Andy, ... make up your mind. You want to hand over power for the world to an "ineffective, namby-pamby organization" that sits "on their hands"? Why?
Why indeed.
Let's face it, Andy Rooney is an incoherent old man who should have been down-sized by CBS back in '91. I knew he had lost it when he dissed Rain-X during his monologue, complaining that he couldn't see the difference between a windshield with Rain-X and one without. Only an unobservant dolt would not be able to tell the difference! It's like night and day.
But then, the whole program is just a big geritol commercial. Can't they find someone (anyone!) younger than 70 to work for the show?
Prisoners With Too Much Time On Their Hands
Whatever happened to sentencing these losers to a lifetime of hard labor?
