Signs it really has been a long time since it rained in Seattle

It's been drizzly at moments this morning, discouraging me from wanting to go outside at all. Despite this, I really should make a trek to the U-District, at the very least since my new glasses are ready for pickup and those might be good to have on vacation, unless I don't mind going with my old prescription for another 10 days.

But it definitely brought back memories of Orange County, or at least of the opening of the O.C. episode from three weeks ago where Seth calls Ryan, even though a mere 15 feet separates the kitchen from the pool house, since both are too chicken to go out in the wet.

Thisis how we do things in Orange County!

Bush to World: 'I don't bite my thumb at you; I give you a big, double-middle finger Texas salute to show what I think of your piddling world'

The 64,000 Ruble Question:

WIll leading neo-con Paul Wolfowitz inflict more harm and suffering on the global population now that Bush has tabbed him to lead the World Bank than he did as deputy secretary of defense?

President Bush described Mr Wolfowitz as a "compassionate, decent man" committed to global development.

Great. So now he gets to terrorize poor countries with bankers instead of bombs.

Why I love the Slovak (and Czech) media

Petr Bokuvka, a Czech who hosts an English-language broadcast, Slovakia Today, on Radio Slovakia International, reports on a misinformed -- or else stupid, flighty, moronic -- journalist from Lithuania who called him wanting comment on how his country feels about talks with Croatia on EU accession:

I have a strong feeling that the lady wanted to call the English broadcast of the SLOVENIAN public radio and her staffers gave her wrong institution and wrong number. But what the hell, we did the dispatch anyway. It's her call.

If it looks like a liar ...

The agency's objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.

Right. The Department of Homeland Security isn't trying to induce hysteria by producing a list of a dozen doomsday scenarios that have no credible basis for viewing as likely possibilities and the Department just "accidentally" leaked this list to the public.

And the White House has no policy of controlling messages at public events.

For an encore, the two men say they're gonna piss on the Alamo so they can also get banned from Texas for 10 years

Selected gems from a police story about two Czechs who were banned from Slovakia for 10 years for burning American flags during Bush's address in Bratislava a couple of weeks ago:

In his address, Bush held up Slovakia as a model of democracy and spoke in soaring language on the inevitability of democracy and freedom taking root across the globe. Some of his words seemed at odds with measures taken on the square, which was carved up by makeshift barriers and metal detectors and watched from above by sharpshooters in black.

Why don't we ever get these sorts of snide editorial comments in the American press? It's refreshing to read a journalist who's willing to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

The Slovak justice minister later questioned the legality of confiscating signs. The Interior Ministry, in charge of the police, referred questions to the American Embassy in Bratislava, which in turn referred them to the White House. "There's no White House policy of controlling messages at a public event," a White House official said. "The allegations [of the Slovak press] sound highly specious."

Right. But covert propaganda is another matter entirely.

Three Slovaks were arrested during the speech for shouting obscenities at Bush.

They said there's no White House policy of controlling messages at a public event. What are you trying to insinuate here anyway?

Hi-larious

Why I've pronounced Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls "excellent" after reading three pages:

Irene Svensson therefore produced a new paper and she thought, this time, she had put one over on me. But luck was against her. Having first underestimated my scholarship, she now failed to reckon with Murphy's Law. She bought a ready-written essay from a shady operation calling itself Term Papers Inc. Two years before, they had sold the same paper to a pretty Chinese student from Trinidad by the name of Priscilla Wong Sim, who had turned to Term Papers Inc. at my indirect suggestion -- to pass her with a clear conscience I had to have at least one essay from her in which every second word was not misspelled and there were no such oriental mysteries as "This novel is a novel. It is a great work, for it is written in the form of a book."

As a grad student who reads dozens of undergrad papers a week, I can say that more than one ESL student has inspired similar thoughts.

It can be fun, though, to try to guess the student's native language from the grammatical mistakes in his/her paper. (Hint: If they have this pesky habit of not using articles -- at all -- think of Slavic languages. Except Bulgarian. For some reason it has articles.)

If at first you're proven a liar, keep lying until people start believing the lie

A good example of why Francis Fukuyama should be regarded as nothing more than a crackpot political scientist, from his essay reviewing the centennial of Max Weber's treatise on the Protestant work ethic:

One might even take a broader view of what constitutes religion and charismatic authority. The past century was marked by what the German theorist Carl Schmitt labeled ''political-theological'' movements, like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, that were based on passionate commitments to ultimately irrational beliefs. Marxism claimed to be scientific, but its real-world adherents followed leaders like Lenin, Stalin or Mao with the kind of blind commitment to authority that is psychologically indistinguishable from religious passion. (During the Cultural Revolution in China, a person had to be careful about what he did with old newspapers; if a paper contained a picture of Mao and one sat on the holy image or used the newspaper to wrap a fish, one was in danger of being named a counterrevolutionary.)

Notice how he glosses over Nazism and the German Protestant authoritarian traditions that helped give rise to it.

Notice also how in one breath he contends the adherents of Marxism followed leaders with "blind commitment to authority" and in the very next sentence contradicts himself by pointing to the kinds of coercion that commanded such obedience.

What, then, would you expect from someone who, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, wrote a triumphalist work proclaiming the victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism as "the end of history"?

Naturally, when he gave a talk last year titled "The End of History 15 Years Later," he didn't update his thesis to, you know, take into account all the history that has happened in the intervening 15 years that suggests Fukuyama is far from the mark.

Polish Rapper Under Fire for Use of the Word 'Polack'

DETROIT--MC Krakow, a popular Detroit-based rapper of Polish descent, came under fire Tuesday for his use of the word 'Polack' on his new album, World Warsaw III. "When MC Krakow casually uses the P-word, it dredges up decades of hurtful portrayals and cruel jokes for our people," said Sandy Serwacki, president of the Polish Anti-Defamation Society. "In just the song 'Ten-Inch Pierogie' alone, he uses the word 27 times." In an official statement, MC Krakow defended his use of the word: "When I say, 'Y'all be my Polacks,' or 'Yo, what up, Polack?,' it's my way of taking the word back. Our people need to re-claim and embrace 'Polack' with pride, just like Eminem did with the word 'faggot.'"

With allies like this...

I'd say this will hurt recruitment to the Coalition of the Shilling, but you can't really go down from next-to-nothing.

Italian Hostage Freed in Iraq Is Shot by G.I.'s Near Airport

Why am I not surprised USA Today did this?

If you want a prime example of the lazy U.S. media parroting anything and everything the Bush administration says and does, look no further than the 18 February edition of USA Today.

Taking a page from the Dubya atlas of the world, the graphics team at USA Today mistook Slovakia for Slovenia in a map illustrating the stops on Bush's journey to Europe last week.



Now, a lot of Slovaks are going to be thrilled to discover that their homeland has an Adriatic coast. But conversely, I feel a lot of Slovenes will be disappointed that Bratislava has supplanted Ljubljana as their capital city.

(And yes, I realize only seven other people in the United States can locate Bratislava and Ljubljana on a map and know the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia. But it amuses me all the same.)

And in other news, rich people have a lot of money

ESPN.com brings us this stunning exposé from the world of professional football where, astonishingly, a new study has found that a majority of NFL players are fat.