Gumby Passport Surgery

Would you like to disable the RFID chip in your spankin' new passport? Then what you need to do is follow these detailed step-by-step instructions.


1) Hit it with a hammer.

2) Repeat as necessary.


Yes, I'm serious (via Boing Boing).

Would the addition of chicken have made a difference?

In deference to this blog's penchant for Chicken Caesar Reviews and the brilliance that is Mimi Smartypants, the following is a recounting of one of her recent dreams:

I woke up thinking about Andrew Marvell and Alexander Pope fighting a duel inside a wooden bowl full of Caesar salad. This could not ever have happened (oh really?) because they were not quite contemporaries (Marvell died in 1678, Pope was born ten years later); Caesar salad was not invented until the 20th century; and that would have had to be one huge salad bowl or two really small poets---either way you know something is wrong. I do not remember who was winning, or whether this was bare-knuckled battle or with weapons, but I do recall that every once in a while one of them would try to climb out and a stream of olive oil would run down the side, knocking the combatant back to the salad arena.

In case you are wondering, the answer to the query in the post title is this: It depends on whether the chicken is in chunks or strips.

The Fifth State

I want to wish everyone Happy Holidays (Bill O'Reilly can bite me) and extend my sincere congratulations to California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and (as of this week) New Jersey for having your heads screwed on straight and your priorities in order. Congratulations!

See you folks next week.

Leaving nothing to chance

The following is from a New York Daily News article (via Think Progress) in late November:

Eager to begin refurbishing his tattered legacy, the President hopes to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush lived in Dallas until he was elected governor of Texas in 1995.

Bush sources with direct knowledge of library plans told the Daily News that SMU and Bush fund-raisers hope to get half of the half billion from what they call "megadonations" of $10 million to $20 million a pop.

Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential "mega" donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement - now expected early in the new year.

"You can't ask people in Dallas for $20 million until they can be sure the library won't be in Waco," one Bush source noted.

The rest of the cash will come from donors willing to pony up $25,000 to $5 million.

"It's a stretch," said another source briefed on the plans. "It's so much bigger than anything that's been tried before. But the more you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert."

The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries. But Bush partisans are determined to have a massive pile of endowment cash to spread the gospel of a presidency that for now gets poor marks from many scholars and a majority of Americans.

The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Bush's institute will hire conservative scholars and "give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President's policies," one Bush insider said.

Then this appeared on Think Progress about two weeks later:

"I'll be dead when they get it right." – President Bush, on how his legacy will be viewed, according to a "recent visitor" to the White House who says Bush is "still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him."

Yeah, especially when you stack the deck.

But, of course, the library isn't the entire country. And no matter how much money is invested into this one cluster of buildings, it will end up as a sort of pitiful shrine for the Dubya faithful to take their children on a pilgrimage. "You see, son? He was actually a great man! And it was actually Democrats that got all those soldiers killed and created Civil War in Iraq!"

It's all so very sad. And is it any wonder that the staff of Southern Methodist University have already made their feelings known that they do not wish to be host to this monument to delusion?

The True Meaning of Christmas:

To be kind and respectful of one another.

Of course, this is a "family value" that should be practiced year round. But the Bill O'Reilly Brigade has been the antithesis of this spirit for two years running, now. Slate has an excellent breakdown of this today:

It's fitting that Eisenhower should have pioneered the tradition of all-purpose holiday messages. They typified his belief that, as he once put it, "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is. With us, of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal." His statement expressed the paradox of America's emerging religious disposition in the 1950s. In many ways, religion was resurgent in public life, with prayer breakfasts, "In God We Trust" added to paper currency, and the words "under God" inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance. Simultaneously, however, the Holocaust had made the merits (indeed the necessity) of religious toleration all the more compelling. Most Protestants, moreover, had come to realize that immigration had permanently transformed the American populace and that for comity to prevail in daily life, diverse creeds would have to coexist. Hence, this was also the golden age of the "interfaith" movement and the spread of that insipid public-relations neologism Judeo-Christian (a phrase that crystallizes the conflation of Christmas and Hanukkah).

Will Herberg's classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) captured the detente achieved among America's three leading religions. The book examined the Eisenhower Era condition of "pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity." Herberg concluded that Americans (not unlike Ike) placed a high value not so much on God as on religion itself. "One's particular religion is, of course, to be cherished and loyally adhered to," he wrote, "but it is not felt to be something that one 'flaunts' in the face of people of other faiths." Most Americans in the 1950s believed in God, yet insisted that their beliefs didn't impinge much on their politics or business affairs. And, as Herberg noted, "what is secularism but the practice of the absence of God in affairs of life?" The same mix of private faith and public accommodation—precisely what irritates today's Christianists—prevails today.

The interfaith, tolerant spirit, ascendant in the 1920s, had by the '50s become synonymous with what Herberg called "the American Way of Life." In the decades since, we have expanded the Protestant-Catholic-Jew troika to include Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others (although not without some ugly resistance). And, certain terms of the compact have been renegotiated, as when the Supreme Court concluded that prayer doesn't belong in public schools—though, in keeping with Herberg's analysis, a moment of silence has remained constitutionally kosher. Overall, the understandings reached by the 1950s have remained an American consensus. Indeed, far from a war on Christmas, this consensus should be seen as a socially useful, ideologically justifiable, and highly agreeable truce.

Far from this, most right-wing Christians have taken their "Freedom of Religion" to mean something else: The Freedom to be Assholes.

Way to propagate the Christmas Spirit, Bill.

Funny, Christian Bale doesn't look Russian

So, Russia has an Intelligence Agency called the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie. This is their logo (via Boing Boing):



In related news, the CIA unveiled plans to renovate their image by creating their own eye-catching logo.



Despite this bit of modernization, CIA director Michael V. Hayden reassured the country that the CIA will continue to stand for "truth, justice and the American way".