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This is where I blog now.

Livejournal, I bid thee adieu.

The Livejournal home page has a link that sends you to random Livejournals. Allow me to summarize the ten I just visited.

1. "I'm depressed and my life sucks."
2. Nothing but lyrics.
3. The thoughtful inventory of a cheerleader's life.
4. "yeah I am on the phone with Sam at this moment, I love him sooo much!!!! He told me that I am his IDEAL WOMAN!!" Actual quote.
5. Two entries on how this guy is a computer nerd, one entry consistingly of his PREORDERED Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tickets.
6. Three entries, none of it was English. I don't consider "omfg wtf r u doing!!1! lol!1!!!" to be English.
7. Lyrics and online quizzes.
8. Lyrics and online quizzes.
9. "in the next 20 min and you WILL have the best day of your life on Valentines Day.You're number one *love*Will either kiss you, ask you out, or call you.If you break this chain The little boy from the grudgewill be in youre room tonight at exactly 11:30pm.So copy &paste this to 15 ppl NOW DO NOT SEND THIS BACK TO THE PERSON U GOT IT FROM!!

So silly I believe this stuff."
10. A poet whose poems consist of huge blank spaces for no reason. Making readers scroll is not art.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Two opposing groups hurled insults at each other across police barricades Saturday during a tension-filled neo-Nazi rally that culminated in 17 arrests.

Clad in khaki uniforms, tall black boots and red arm patches bearing swastikas, about 30 members of the National Socialist Movement were barricaded on one side by SWAT team members.

On the other side, a group of black-clad counter-demonstrators, many covering their faces with black masks, held anti-Nazi signs.

Several counter-demonstrators were arrested before the march officially began when pockets of violence erupted, police said.

A total of 17 people were arrested Saturday, including 14 members of out-of-town groups such as the Skinheads Against Racial Prejudices and the Southeastern Anarchist Network were arrested, said Orlando Police spokeswoman Barb Jones.

All faced charges including disorderly conduct, battery on a law enforcement officer and wearing a mask, police said. Full story

Another excellent protest of racist bigotry ending with protesters in jail and more publicity for the racists. Here's an easy way to gauge your protest's success: If more people on your side are arrested for violence against police officers than there are people in the group you're protesting, you lose.

Bonus points given for anyone arrested for violating the law against wearing masks in public, a law that the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated against. Naturally, in the counter-protest of over 1,000 people to the 16 Klan members there were several people arrested for attacking Klan members. No Klansmen arrested though.

With that specific incident I think it's all the more telling that people who protest these things are stupid. The specific issue being protested by the Klan was a law banning the wearing of masks in public. The ACLU even sided with them. The counter-protesters gave them all that publicity for nothing. It must have been the Klan's birthday, how sweet.

Before the rally, authorities encouraged counter-demonstrators to stay home, hoping to avoid the violence that occurred when the same group marched through Toledo, Ohio, in October. A riot ensued, during which protesters threw rocks at police and burned down a bar.

I'm glad that Florida State Senator Gary Siplin "decided to go against the advice of other community leaders and police to organize a counter demonstration." Full story on that

"We're gonna love 'em in our neighborhood, love 'em to death," Senator Siplin said.

Love them to death. I guess that's why more than a hundred police and SWAT officers were needed to restrain the counter-demonstraters. All that love.

In other news, I found a Proletarian Revolution article saying that the counter-protest to the above-mentioned Klan demonstration was not a complete success because the Klansmen weren't "driven from the streets and given a beating." It went on to detail a plan for attacking innocent police officers.

The slogan "Stop the Klan!", under which the PDC had initiated its call, was necessary but not sufficient to prepare demonstrators for an actual confrontation.

Prepare for what confrontation you say?

It is one thing to say that it would be great if numbers and unity scared the Klan into retreating. It is another to not even deal with the obvious: that the KKK would be heavily protected by the police, and would only be "stopped" by a fighting effort that would have to defend itself against the cops. Here's what our leaflet said on the subject:

"As they have done in the past, the cops will aim to keep us under their control and far from the fascists whom they aim to protect. In city after city, every time the fascists rear their ugly heads, the cops are there with their guns and batons turned against us...."

That "would only be 'stopped' by a fighting effort that would have to defend itself against the cops"? Meaning that after they attacked the police the police would fight back? They're not actually taking credit for happily attacking police and preparing to use violence on people for exercizing their freedom, are they?

Many of the anti-Klan protesters arrived at the rally with no clear intention of trying to smash the Klan. Nevertheless, our agitation and our leaflet in favor of doing this received a warm reception. More importantly, the appearance of the Klan enraged the crowd and made clear to many protesters what they hadn't recognized before: that they wanted to smash the Klan!

Terrorist acts from a terrorist organization.

The Proletarian Revolution is printed by the League for the Revolutionary Party. The League for the Revolutionary Party broke away from the Revolutionary Socialists League in the 70s, as did the International Socialists Organization.Granted, this article goes on to criticize the ISO for being too timid during the protest (which worries me that someone could be crazy enough to think the ISO could ever be considered the voice of reason), but this authoritarian method is indicative of the whole way of thinking.

These socialists are opposed to freedom, and their willingness to use premeditated force against innocent people makes them a terrorist organization.

James Campion has another of those 50 Greatest Sports Moments of All Time. A decent amount of foreign moments are mentioned, but the natural emphasis on American sports is there. Altogether it's a good list and an interesting read, though I have to take issue with some events he left and some included, his ranking with the first 20 or so, and including Mark McGwire at all (Side note: Mark McGwire married a former pharmaceutical sales representative in 2002, I'm hoping Leno called him on that).

My favorite is 10. Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man" Farewell Speech - 7/4/39



"In a moment forever held in time for every figure in sports history to heed, a dying man stood before over 60,000 people and the world to impart the genuine feeling that he was 'the luckiest man in the world' for having the opportunity to endeavor through the love of his craft. Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, who had not missed a game his entire 13-plus year career (spanning a mind-bending 2,130 consecutive games) lowered his head and became the symbol of what sports, and maybe all of life is about; accepting your destiny, giving it your all, and enjoying every moment, good or ill."

( Read Gehrig's speech here )

Well played, Lou. Well played. At that ceremony, Gehrig became nervous from emotion and asked sportswriter Sid Mercer to speak for him. After the crowd started shouting "We want Gehrig," he stepped up to the mic and gave a tearful, intimate speech that truly was one of sport's greatest moments.

Gehrig's jersey number, 4, was retired by the Yankees. He is the first player in history to receive this honor. The Baseball Writers Association of America excepted Gehrig from the mandatory five year waiting period, voting him into the Hall of Fame in Dec, 1939. He died a year and a half later.

The monument dedicated to Gehrig at Yankee stadium reads, "A man, a gentleman and a great ballplayer whose amazing record of 2,130 consecutive games should stand for all time," but I think Gehrig may be the only person in history who summed himself up better than anyone else could.

LOS ANGELES - Don Knotts, the skinny, lovable nerd who kept generations of television audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show,” has died. He was 81.

Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs “The Andy Griffith Show,” and another Knotts hit, “Three’s Company.”

This actually really bums me out. Completely rewriting next week's column now.

Alamance County, NC -- An elderly woman drove the wrong way down the interstate... from Orange County to Alamance County.

She faced hundreds of cars and trucks along the way on Tuesday afternoon, making it 14 miles, from Hillsborough to Haw River, without causing a scratch. Full story with video

...but the test to get a driver's license is not hard enough. I'm proud to be from North Carolina. On the other hand, Maryland is looking pretty good right about now:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- Debate under way in Annapolis focused Tuesday on nearly two-dozen bills drafted to address drunken driving.

Baltimore television station WBAL reported that one bill would have convicted drunken drivers wear a Scarlet Letter of sorts.

According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics, 45 percent of Maryland's traffic fatalities are related to alcohol. The House Judiciary Committee heard about 18 driving under the influence bills Tuesday, but none as controversial as the so-called Scarlet Letter approach.

Montgomery County Delegate Herman Taylor, D-District 14, introduced House Bill 1315, which would require the state's Motor Vehicle Administration to issue special license plates to people convicted on at least two DUI offenses.

The license plates would contain the letters "DUI" in bold. Taylor said a drunken driver struck him last May, and at the time of the crash, police had no idea that person was a multiple offender. Full story

I enjoy Maryland. They're facilitating a way for drunk drivers to receive the shame and humiliation that they should.

Upon waking this afternoon, I was pleased to hear that my second class of the day had been cancelled, making a pair of the first cancellation which allowed me to sleep until noon. I've been attempting these past few days to collect on sleep owed to me by several late nights.

I spent much of my morning, or afternoon depending on how you define it, doing assignments for the two cancelled classes. Professors have that rare ability to take up student's time regardless of their location.

Which leads me into a not altogether unrelated question, if professors must go to school nearly twice as long in order to acquire the academic mettle to teach, who teaches the professors? And how long must they have gone to college? And who taught them originally? It would seem there must have been a point long ago where one gentleman who knew relatively nothing about anything declared himself to be a scholar, and taught a class about the things that he did not know. It would also seem that many professors today follow suit.

More to the subject, after a couple hours spent writing TV news broadcast copy, which I imagine has to be the lowest level of television writing (television itself being the lowest medium for a writer), I turned my ear to Ambrose Bierce and his short story The Parenticide Club. The end result was much pleasure on my part and your frustration with the tone of this current writing. Anytime I listen to anything British I can't stop my mind from switching back to some sort of recessive mental accent hidden deep in my subconscious. In my head I'm British for the rest of the day.

Granted, Bierce is American. But at least one of the stories take place in England, and the person who recorded the audio book for Librivox was indeed British, making for an exceedingly delightful listening experience.

My point is such: The Parenticide Club is a gruesome masterpiece. Horror, laughter, the proper word for the feeling of being "grossed out", this collection of four short stories has all of it. I recommend the first and third stories, if on no other basis than their first sentence.

MY FAVORITE MURDER - Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years.

AN IMPERFECT CONFLAGRATION - Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father--an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.

These are simply two of many, The Parenticide Club is full of much more enticing sentences. Ones like:

After that I had not the trouble to bring a luncheon for myself: that little girl was my daily purveyor; and not infrequently in satisfying my simple need from her frugal store I combined pleasure and profit by constraining her attendance at the feast and making misleading proffer of the viands, which eventually I consumed to the last fragment.

I don't even know where to begin diagramming that sentence, let alone writing something like it. Bierce presents just the right mix of large, archaic words and odd sentence structure to make the story seem old, which it is, while still leaving it understandable. Perhaps that's what people thought of Shakespeare a hundred years after he died, when the joking references did not yet require a encyclopedia to understand.

Get the story for free. Read it at Project Gutenberg, or listen to Peter Yearsley's soothing British inflections; "the Queen's english" as Anthony Ridge would put it.

Video

If you don't feel like watching the whole thing, go to 2:45 and watch where he puts the microphone. That's all I'm going to say.

http://entensity.net/

The Smoking Gun - When news of George W. Bush's drunken driving arrest surfaced during the final week of the 2000 presidential campaign, Republicans tried to dismiss it as one of those "youthful indiscretions" Bush had steadfastly refused to discuss. Of course, when he got popped in Kennebunkport in 1976, Bush was 30 years old, hardly a kid.

Vice President Dick Cheney, on the other hand, could actually argue that his two DWIs came when he was young and reckless. Full story

Odd, I thought alcohol was good for your heart. Don't worry about the shooting accident though, the ranch owner has said that no one was drinking. Well, maybe "a beer or two". Don't worry unless you're Harry Whittington that is, who is back in intensive care after a pellet moved to his heart and caused a minor heart attack.

If you're wondering how badly Whittington got "peppered," a doctor puts the estimate of pellets in him at "less than 150 or 200." Forbes says, "A three-quarter ounce load of that size shot would normally contain more than 250 pellets. Each pellet is about the size of a small letter "o" in newspaper print." That's a lot of pepper.

The alcohol inconsistency alone warrants investigation, and if Whittington doesn't make it the local DA has already said there will be a grand jury investigation. I've said before that I think both murderers and drunks drivers should be executed. It'd be funny if Cheney turns out to be both.