This is what the Bleat looked like the day it began a decade ago. Ten years! In internet years, Im already dead. The graphic above is an approximation of the original banner, which was intended to mimic the look of the KEDS logo on the back of my childhood sneakers. Really. The first entry was nothing special, but it contained references to Jasper Dog and the Giant Swede, both of which are still with us. Otherwise, a few things have changed.
I was living at 5226 Girard Avenue South, writing on an underwhelming Performa with a 630 X 480 screen; no iTunes, rudimentary video-in, no TiVo, no broadband. The site was hosted on AOL. Yet we were happy. Why, we didnt know we were poor. The main index page had a link to the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which was about 30 pages long with tiny grainy graphics. I didnt have a scanner I imported graphics by shooting them with a video camera and using a rudimentary screen-capture card to get the image into Photoshop. Of course, back then we called it Rotogravure Shop, and we wore onions on our belts as was the custom in those times. If youd told me that Id get a book out of the Gallery in four years, I would have been delighted. In 1997 I had come to believe my career had stalled for good, after all. I started the Bleat because web diaries were all the rage, and the website - begun a year earlier had become my primary means of filling my empty hours.
I had a lot of empty hours.
Within a few months, everything would change . . .
Happy Bleatday/Blogiversary/whatever-you-call-it to one of the world's great writers
Posted by: Mike ||
02/02/2007 13:46 ||
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Indonesia will declare bird flu a national disaster, giving the government access to special funds to combat the disease that has killed 63 people, the planning minister said. It has become an epidemic, Paskah Suzetta said Wednesday in Jakarta, where authorities were preparing for the compulsory slaughter of thousands of backyard chickens as part of high-profile efforts to fight the H5N1 bird flu virus.
Indonesia, which has tallied more than one-third of the world's human deaths from H5N1, has come under criticism for failing to crack down on bird flu when it first appeared in poultry stocks nearly four years ago. The virus is now endemic in chickens almost all over the country and despite optimism late last year that it may have been contained, it killed six people in the last month. Many of the 63 people who have died lived near the teeming capital, home also to more than 100,000 backyard chickens, ducks, doves and song birds.
Authorities gave residents weeks to voluntarily destroy their birds and were preparing to go door-to-door in some neighbourhoods Thursday to make sure the order had been carried out, Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso said.
RANGPUR, Jan 31: A young girl received severe burn injury as a miscreant hurled acid on her at Gagla Bazaar village under Nageswari upazila in Kurigram district in the small hours of Saturday, reports BSS. Police sources said the victim was identified as China Khatun, 22, daughter of Moti Dorji and the miscreant as Akram Hossain, 25, son of Sobed Ali of the same village.
Victim''s family sources said Akram entered the bedroom of China by cutting the bamboo fence of his father''s house and hurled acid on her as she repeatedly refused his proposal of making illicit relationship with him. China''s left eye, hands, chicks, shoulders, backside and some other parts of the body were severely burnt by the acid.
Any chance Akram can die a painful death?
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/02/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Acid for acid would be fair, I think. And he takes his chances on what gets hurt and how much just like she did.
#3
I was going to say that nothing says the guy's Muslim, but then I saw his last name. "Hossain" sure sounds Muslim to me, while "China" and "Moti Dorji" do not.
My suggestion: tie him down on a stainless steel table with a drain, then slowly drip acid on his scrotum -- one drop every minute or so -- until he's castrated.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
02/02/2007 8:23 Comments ||
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#4
He'd probably enjoy it , sadist bastage .
I prefer the option of pulling his eyes out with a pair of rusty tweezers so they dangle next to his chest , followed by pulling his heart out with a rusty spoon , whilst he looks on .
Even in the eight years since the last war ended, commerce has not revived in cities like Leskovac, in southeastern Serbia. The heavy cost is still being tallied, in the young who flee and the others who turn gray and dispirited.
Babicko, a nearby village, is simply dying. Of 700 residents, only 4 are children of school age. Houses, whether of stone or mud brick, are falling into disrepair. When the time comes, "my daughter can try to sell it," said Ljuboslava Svetkovic, a pensioner living there. "If not, it will all collapse."
"This is the Balkans," said a forlorn Ljubisa Svetanovic, 55, who lives in Babicko. "God has said good night. Life stopped here a long time ago."
MULTAN: Two men have been arrested for allegedly bludgeoning their sister and her lover to death with bricks in a Pakistani village, a gruesome slaying that one of the suspects said was carried out to restore family honour, police said Thursday. In another village, police detained six men accused of abducting and raping a teenage girl after one of their female relatives eloped with a man from the victims family.
Police officers found the bodies of Ilahi Seen (45) and her lover in a house in the village of Donga Bonga in eastern Punjab province, after villagers reported hearing cries, said Ghulam Murtaza, head of the village police station. The womans brothers attacked the couple when they were together in her room after midnight on Monday, said Murtaza, adding that the victims had been hit repeatedly over the head with bricks. He said the floor and walls of the room, in the house where the woman lived with her brothers, were spattered with blood.
One of the men in police custody said that they saw the couple in a wrong situation and attacked them, said Murtaza. We hit them until they became cold, Murtaza quoted one of the suspects, Maqbool Ahmed, as saying. We know our homes have been ruined, but we have done nothing wrong. We poor people only have our honour to protect, Ahmed was quoted as saying. Murtaza said police had filed a murder case against Ahmed and his brother Mohammed Aslam.
Meanwhile, the suspected rape took place earlier this week in the village of Habib Labano in Sindh. About a dozen men allegedly kidnapped a 16-year-old girl, raped her and sent her home with her clothes torn open, said local police officer Irfan Farooqi. He said that six of the 12 suspects identified by the girls father had been arrested. He said that police were still searching for the others and were awaiting the results of a medical examination to confirm whether the girl was assaulted. The alleged abductors told the girl to tell her family that they had taken revenge for our honour, Farooqi quoted the girl as saying.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/02/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
And we call the Paleos pre-historic?
Posted by: Bobby ||
02/02/2007 6:35 Comments ||
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#2
restore family honour WTF? These people are barbarians from the 7th century.
#6
To restore family "honour" they will go to a pakistani jail and get buggered in the arse? That doesn't sound very "honour"able to me. Sounds very islamic though.
#8
Save the chickens in Indonesia, let them eat these skunks.
The more I see of Islam in action, the more convinced I am that we are wasting time here.
Kill them all and bulldoze the mosques and burn the korans.
PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa. - A new pair of hands pulled Punxsutawney Phil from his stump this year, so it was only fitting that the groundhog offered a new prediction.
Phil did not see his shadow on Friday which, according to German folklore, means folks can expect an early spring instead of six more weeks of winter.
Since 1886, Phil has seen his shadow 96 times, hasn't seen it 14 times and there are no records for nine years, according to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. The last time Phil failed to see his shadow was in 1999.
More than 15,000 revelers milled about in a misty snow waiting for the prediction, as fireworks exploded overhead and the "Pennsylvania Polka" and other music blared in the background.
Longtime handler Bill Deeley retired after more than a dozen years and was replaced Friday by Punxsutawney Groundhog Club Inner Circle members John Griffiths and Ben Hughes.
Each Feb. 2, thousands of people descend on Punxsutawney, a town of about 6,100 people about 65 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, to celebrate what had essentially been a German superstition.
The Germans believed that if a hibernating animal cast a shadow on Feb. 2 the Christian holiday of Candlemas winter would last another six weeks. If no shadow was seen, legend said spring would come early.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
02/02/2007 10:39 Comments ||
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And, yet, I do wonder if this "superstition" is more scientific than the global warming climate change lemmings.
Posted by: BA ||
02/02/2007 11:41 Comments ||
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#5
And, yet, I do wonder if this "superstition" is more scientific than the global warming climate change lemmings.
It's way more scientific. It's based on leng term weather predictions and the almanac. These are based on real weather facts and real statistics. The whole 'global warming' cult is based on sheer fantasy.
#6
The real McCoy, Jimmy, says 6 more weeks of winter
Posted by: James ||
02/02/2007 13:27 Comments ||
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with the temperature below zero today and pretty much all week here in Colorado, not counting wind chill, I love the PA prediction and will go with that one.
;) I'm just glad my car started! geez
Posted by: Jan from work ||
02/02/2007 20:31 Comments ||
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Hell, it was +48F here in Anchorage today. What kind of winter are we expected to have for the next 6 weeks, PP? I wanna know.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
02/02/2007 23:11 Comments ||
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Polka, Bratwursts, Hoagies, Beer, Nouveau items and Pies - Ole' Phil nor anyone else has to worry about eating good. Only issue for Phil is how much fat layers to add a season before Mrs. Phil starts complaining.
#1
Jeebus, I was first gonna guess Seattle. But, Macon, Georgia? Home of John Rocker (Atlanta Braves pitcher who said the "n word" in that interview about the NYC subway a few years ago)?
But, then I realized that Macon's changed as much as Atlanta has. Illegal aliens pouring in there, as well as a whole class of citizens addicted to the public-teet. Think of it as a small area of Georgia, akin to Cynthia McKinney's district. At least he seems level-headed about it, and it wasn't a conversion to Nation of Islam.
Posted by: BA ||
02/02/2007 11:52 Comments ||
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Ellis said he has been studying the Quran for years and that his new religion was originally practiced by his ancestors before they were brought to North America as slaves.
#4
One more symptom of the "islam-as-the-ultimate-in-your-face-to-the-western-(white-christian-male)-world-order".
A few decades ago, he might have "converted" to radical leftism; nowadays, the driving force is militant islam, "revolutionary islam" as termed by muslim convert carlos the jackal, who predicts/hopes it will be the force which will finally defeat capitalism and liberal democracy.
See a 2004 article about that rallying : The Reds, The Browns and the Greens or The Convergence of Totalitarianisms
#7
Ellis must have read Mark Steyn's book, America Alone. Ellis is cutting edge.
Hell, black civil rights are old hat. So 1960's. It's hot and so hip to be black and Sunni. When he runs for re-election his coffers will be filled by donations from the fifth column from here and abroad.
What Ellis hasn't studied is the treatment of black muslims by they're arab overlords. He'll learn in due course when whitey is no longer around to protect him.
Posted by: Mark Z ||
02/02/2007 15:04 Comments ||
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Not "they're". Meant to type "their"
Sorry.
Posted by: Mark Z ||
02/02/2007 15:06 Comments ||
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#9
the savedarfur.org people have probably already invited him to darfur
#11
Jack Ellis is a piece of work, a loose cannon of epic proportions. If he were white, he would be in prison, but he is not and has become the elected jester of Macon. I think that many of his black supporters are amused by his sheer audacity. He is a cross between Adam Clayton Powell and Kingfish (of Amos & Andy fame). I spend a lot of time in Warner Robins (about 10 miles down the road from Macon) and am continually amused by the plaintive quality of the opposition to Ellis. He is so outrageous that he has hammered his opponents into disbelief and sputtering impotence.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
RANGPUR, Jan 31: A young girl received severe burn injury as a miscreant hurled acid on her at Gagla Bazaar village under Nageswari upazila in Kurigram district in the small hours of Saturday, reports BSS. Police sources said the victim was identified as China Khatun, 22, daughter of Moti Dorji and the miscreant as Akram Hossain, 25, son of Sobed Ali of the same village. 
MULTAN: Two men have been arrested for allegedly bludgeoning their sister and her lover to death with bricks in a Pakistani village, a gruesome slaying that one of the suspects said was carried out to restore family honour, police said Thursday. In another village, police detained six men accused of abducting and raping a teenage girl after one of their female relatives eloped with a man from the victims family. 
PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa. - A new pair of hands pulled Punxsutawney Phil from his stump this year, so it was only fitting that the groundhog offered a new prediction. 
