This just in from www.mcsweeneys.net. RTWT, and consider this your spraying-the-monitor warning - Mike
January 22, 1939
Assistant Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr.
Department of Anthropology
Chapman Hall 227B
Marshall College
Dr. Jones:
As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Following past policies and procedures, proceedings from the committee's deliberations that were pertinent to our decision have been summarized below according to the assessment criteria. ...
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/23/2006 16:01 ||
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LOL! I think it was the arson of the herpetology department that tipped the scales. Not that I blame him...
BERLIN (Reuters) - Claudia Schiffer believes models are now too skinny to be attractive even though the German supermodel may herself be slightly underweight despite a voracious appetite and predilection for chocolate.
"It doesn't really look good any more," the 36-year-old was quoted as saying in an interview with Germany's Bunte magazine. "Fashion looks good on thin models, but when you look at today's models you can not help but think there is something wrong. They are way too thin. It is only bones that stick out."
#1
I believe the applicable term is "bag of antlers"
I dunno Fred, the graphic is disturbing. You'd think living in the Bay Area that I'd be used to this but it still creeps me out. Gimme the Good Morning graphic any day
Brian Lee Schubert, 66, died of injuries suffered on Saturday when he hit the water 876 ft below the New River Gorge Bridge during West Virginia's annual Bridge Day festival, said the Fayette county sheriff, Bill Laird.
Schubert, from Alta Loma, California, had been well known in the sport of Base jumping since 1966, when he and a friend became the first people to jump from El Capitan, a 3,000 ft tall rock formation in Yosemite National Park in California. The sport's acronym stands for the places jumpers usually leap from: buildings, antennae, spans and earth.
The fatality is the first since 1987 at Bridge Day, a popular event that typically draws an estimated 100,000 spectators and about 400 parachutists to the southern part of the state.
To qualify to jump off the bridge, applicants must have skydived at least 50 times. Jumping at the festival was allowed to go on after Schubert's body was recovered and taken to a funeral home. "No measurable winds or anything would appear to have contributed to adverse conditions making this any more dangerous than Base jumping would ordinarily be," Mr Laird said.
Mathis Reimann, who jumped within an hour after the accident, said that Schubert's death made him think about safety. "It's a dangerous sport and makes it clear you really have to be careful," he said.
Still jumped, didn't he.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/23/2006 00:37 ||
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"Parachute failure"? The parachute was fine - the person attached to it just pulled the cord too late. These folks make a great show of waiting as long as possible before opening the parachute. Pulling the tiger's tail isn't a great way to live to an old age.
#2
Agree wid GROMKY > OWG + Socialism NOw, D *** It, just as the Milyuuhn-earth-sized Sun is refusing to obey singular tiny Earth-Sized Earth, working parachutes + bridges are refusing to unilaterally do anything extra to protect human lives from themselves.
Gravity doesn't hate us, it just loves us too much.
Posted by: Steve ||
10/23/2006 12:01 Comments ||
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More info:A pioneer of Base jumping, where parachutists leap from fixed objects rather than aircraft, has died making what is thought to have been his first parachute jump in decades. Brian Lee Schubert, who lived most of his life as a quiet, unremarkable policeman in Pomona, California, wrote his name into the short, dangerous history of Base jumping in 1966, when as 26-year-old truck driver he leapt with a friend from El Capitan, a 3,000ft (900m) tall rock in Californias Yosemite National Park. In the first known Base jump (Base stands for "Buildings, Antennae, Spans and Earth"), Schubert, an experienced Army parachutist, was swept back against the rockface and broke a leg and a foot. His partner, Mike Pelkey, was also buffetted against the rock, breaking his ankle.
But both survived, and became shadowy legends in a sport that found a wider audience and celebrity a full 20 years later as parachute technology improved the chances of survival from short falls. Although their names are widely known in the sport, Schubert and Pelkey were rarely seen at Base jumping events and The Los Angeles Times reported today that Schubert had not made a jump for decades.
Lew Whitener, a photographer covering the jump for a local newspaper, said Schubert dropped from the bridge but did not open his parachute until he was 25ft above the water. He died on impact, according to emergency personnel at the scene.
Jean Boenish, the wife of Carl Boenish, and a former safety director at the event, said Schubert had done just one day of practice: "I would not have let this man jump... I told him I didn't think he was ready. He would have nothing to do with me after that."
Maybe he froze, or might have been a suicide.
Posted by: Steve ||
10/23/2006 12:13 Comments ||
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If you think aviation is an unforgiving sport ...
#12
If it *was* a suicide, shame on him. The WV Bridge Festival is a great party and a magnificent event. His death will inevitably change it for the worse.
That being said, I met some BASE jumpers at (a different) party one time; they all had long lists of friends who had died doing stunts. One described jumping off the Petronas Towers and landing in a puddle of his buddy's blood. Ugh.
#15
Saw the vid. The chute opened but not fully, so he hit the water at a lower velocity than he would have otherwise. Reporter said he survived the impact and was able to move his arms and legs and would be okay. Apparently not the case. A painful way to go.
PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) - Voters overwhelmingly approved the largest modernization plan in the 92-year history of the Panama Canal on Sunday, backing a multi-billion dollar expansion that will allow the world's largest ships to squeeze through the shortcut between the seas.
More than 78 percent of Panamanians voted in favor of the expansion with 94 percent of polling stations counted by the country's electoral tribunal. Almost 57 percent of the country's more than 2.1 million voters did not turn out. Thousands of supporters in green ``Yes'' T-shirts cast ballots endorsing the $5.25 billion overhaul which would allow the canal to handle modern container ships, cruise liners and tankers that are too large for its current 108-foot-wide locks. The plan is to build a third set of locks on the Pacific and Atlantic ends by 2015.
The Panama Canal Authority, the autonomous government agency that runs the canal, says the project will double capacity of a waterway already on pace to generate about $1.4 billion this year. Expansion will be paid for by increasing tolls and take in more than $6 billion annually in revenue by 2025.
Posted by: Steve White ||
10/23/2006 00:20 ||
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As said or indic before, even presuming other nations start it, iff history = histoire' is any measure, America will finish/complete it. CAN ANYONE SAY, "NORTH-SOUTH TRANS-CONTINENTAL HIGHWAY/ROADWAYS BETWEEN NORTH-SOUTH AMERICAS INTO NORTH-SOUTH EURASIA-AUSTRALIA". *FOLLOW THAT INTERNATIONAL-GREENWICH DATELINES BOYZ, D*** IT.
FREEREPUBLIC.com bloggers > "Watch your WalMart [ etal.Mall/Shopping] Bills go down". BUT LIKELY NOT IN OUR GENERATION.
#5
Joe, I think building more highways is a waste of money. The scare talk about new transcontinental roadways to promote OWG is hardly relevant. Oil will be getting scarcer as the years go by, and promises of new and larger discoveries are so far just pipe dreams. It's unlikely that new and vast sources of power for truck traffic will be discovered in the next century. We might as well build different ways to move stuff around the world. Ships (and trains BTW) are way more efficient than diesel trucks, and they can use widely available alternative power sources.
Brave men and women whom the West pretty much ignored.
Many elderly Hungarians still remember the shots that reverberated through the streets - and were heard on the airwaves - as fighting broke out near the radio station in central Budapest. Freedom fighters tried to keep control of the station by holding off the much better armed Communist forces.
The radio station was a crucial information tool during the 1956 Revolution against Soviet rule and Hungary's Moscow-backed government. But the struggle for freedom that began October 23, 1956 was crushed less than two weeks later by Soviet forces. About 2,800 Hungarians died in the fighting and 200,000 others fled to the West.
Now 50 years later, Hungary is free, the Soviet Union is an ever-fading memory, and yet tensions are again high in the country, this time sparked by the anniversary celebrations.
On Sunday, during an awards ceremony in the parliament building, several former freedom fighters refused to shake hands with Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. Mr. Gyurcsany was born five years after the revolution, but he was a leader of Hungary's Communist youth movement in the 1980's, and recently admitted he lied to voters about the economy to win re-election. Outside the parliament building people shouted for his resignation.
The ceremonies to mark the anniversary began Sunday with a concert at the Hungarian State Opera. Just before the performance began, one of the foreign leaders who are in Budapest to mark the anniversary, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, urged Hungarians to overcome their divisions and to celebrate the lasting importance of the revolution 50 years ago. "One thing is clear, the freedom fight of 1956 was not in vain as it showed the courage of the Hungarian people," said Heinz Fischer. He added that the Soviet military was in fact the moral loser. What was bloodily crushed in 1956, Mr. Fischer said, was achieved peacefully in 1989.
Ceremonies Monday to mark the anniversary include the unveiling of a new monument in Budapest's Heroes' Square to honor those who died in the uprising 50 years ago.
On October 23, exactly 50 years ago, the Hungarian revolution broke out. Lets commemorate the brave people who then took to the streets. More than a revolution, it was a fight for freedom. The whole nation took part in it. They wanted to be rid of the Communism that Stalin had imposed on them through the Red Army. Among other symbolic gestures, the Communists had pulled down a famous church and erected a monster statue of Stalin in bronze on the site. The first act of the freedom fighters was to take metal cutters and demolish that statue, leaving nothing but Stalins empty boots on a plinth. Similarly in Baghdad in 2003?
Hungarian soldiers were obliged to wear a Red Star cap-badge, and one of the sounds of the time was the tinkle these cap-badges made when whole units threw them off. Hungarian soldiers and policemen joined the freedom fighters, established themselves in a cinema and a barracks, and fought off the Soviet army. More than epic, it was Homeric, something to remind mankind of the heights we can rise to in order to be free. Dragged along by events, the newly installed Prime Minister Imre Nagy did his best, but he had behind him a lifelong career as a Communist, and he made the fatal mistake of trusting the Russians. We know now that Khrushchev and the Politburo in the Kremlin always preferred a military solution to a political compromise with Hungary. They tricked the Hungarians into coming to arrange a treaty, arrested the delegation, sent the tanks in, smashed up everything, judicially murdered Nagy and at least 300 others, imprisoned over 20,000 and drove 200,000 into exile in the West.
Help Hungary. Help! was the final appeal on the radio, put out by Gyula Hay, the playwright and in his day a veteran Communist too. In sad fact, the United States did nothing, making it plain that the Soviets could do their worst. On hearing that a revolution had broken out, President Eisenhower limited himself to saying, The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary. Heart is all very well, but what about muscle? Robert Murphy, then undersecretary of state and an experienced trouble-shooter, summed up Washingtons failure: Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way.
The problem may change geographical location, but not its essence. Whats to be done about tyranny? Help Iraq. Help! is the message that Iraqi bloggers are putting out more and more urgently. This time the free world indeed intervened to give people their liberty, and again the State Department seems to lack the skill and imagination needed for devising the way to realize it. The Hungarian revolution marked the moment when the inhumanity of Communism was shown up as unbearable, and its doom therefore certain one day. Events in Iraq mark the moment when the inhumanity of Arab and Muslim political order is shown up as unbearable. A day of reform will come, and then the free world can take pride that it did more than show a well-meaning but futile heart
Posted by: Mike ||
10/23/2006 8:00 Comments ||
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As long as communism is celebrated on our universities and the human toll of a 100 million dead, and still counting, is buried by our education system, when personalities make cover by sharing photo ops with Cold War era puppets of Moscow, these stories will remain the rare and arcane. When the National German Socialist Workers Party is a common pejorative but commie is considered an honor by way too many who pass themselves off as intellectuals, the price paid by the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Baltics, and others will not be properly recognized. The left which tries daily to sale guilt and shame for an imperfect American history has no time for living human beings whove survived the horror and dehumanization at the hand of their petty human gods.
#5
I remember being in grade school and reading about the Hungarian uprising and the limp response to it by the west. That's when I learned how to make a Molotov cocktail. That's when I started reading about Communism from MSM like the Reader's Digest. That pretty well immunized my mind from worshipping the god that failed. The sacrifice of the brave Hungarians was not wasted.
#6
I'd love to talk to my Latin teacher from high school on this anniversary. He escaped from Hungary with his wife during the revolution (he laid mine fields in the Army, so he knew where NOT to walk). He lived in Austria and Germany before finally settling here.
His passionate hatred of Communism was legendary at the school. We'd often bring up Communism in class just to watch him rant for the rest of the period (man, talk about a mad Hungarian). But his hatred of Communism was equalled by his passionate love for this country. He is a true American.
So, here's to you, Mr. Lagler. I'm so glad you lived to see your native land emerge from its long nightmare.
If anyone's interested. Here's a good book on the topic. I had to read it for my high school Modern European History class - enlightening and harrowing.
#7
I think everyone of a certain age read "The Bridge at Andau", Xbalanke...I read it in junior high. I think I was innoculated against any attraction towards communism by it. That, and knowing in a casually friendly way, a whole long series of people who had fled from Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and China, etc.
It did not escape attentio that I knew personally all these people who had fled communism with all speed... but not a one who was interested in actually running towards it.
#8
I think everyone of a certain age read "The Bridge at Andau",
I didn't realize it was that widely read, Sgt. Mom. It's telling how almost no school kids read it any more - if they know there even was a Hungarian Revolution. But this past summer Hiroshima was a required book on my ninth-grade son's summer reading list.
#9
I read "Bridge at Andau" also. At the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, my father and a cousin were in the US Army somewhere in the south Pacific, waiting to be sent into the Japanese Home Islands. Another cousin was a US sailor, had already survived a suicide bomb attack on his ship off Okinawa, and was waiting for his ship to be sent into Tokyo Bay where it was to be scuttled (unbeknownst to him). I was born almost 2 years later. Somehow, I never read "Hiroshima" and never regretted not doing so. I did visit the Trinity site in NM on the 60th anniversary of the first nuke tests, soaked up a few rays, said a prayer for the dead of WWII, civilian and military, and was thankful the toll wasn't higher than it was. I did not feel guilty.
The All India Muslim Womens Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) has criticised the stance of Kamal Farooqi of the Muslim Personal Law Board on the fate of rape victim Imrana as unjust, insensitive and brutal, a press release said on Sunday. Parveen Abdi, the boards founder secretary general, stated that Kamal Farooqis view that Imrana could no longer live with her husband since she had been raped by her father-in-law, was devoid of the principal of natural justice where only the perpetrator of a crime is punished and not the victim. Abdi said that the very fact being established that Imrana was raped by her father-in-law determined her status as a victim who needs to be compensated and sympathised with and not condemned and punished.
Kamal Farooqis view on Imrana is based on ill informed, misconceived and gender biased interpretation of Sharia law where a women victim of a crime is punished, Abdi said. She wondered why Farooqi had not suggested the stoning to death of Imranas father-in-law the punishment for adultery and rape. Imrana needs sympathy and support from civil society for her rehabilitation and restoration to normal life with her husband and five children, the release stated, adding that antiquated and savage interpretations of Sharia made Islamic law look regressive and anti-women. Sharia is based on justice, gender justice and fairness, Abdi added.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/23/2006 00:00 ||
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the principal of natural justice
What's that go to do with the price of tea in China, or more precisely, with laws derived from Sharia?
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.
Claudia Schiffer says models are too thin
PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) - Voters overwhelmingly approved the largest modernization plan in the 92-year history of the Panama Canal on Sunday, backing a multi-billion dollar expansion that will allow the world's largest ships to squeeze through the shortcut between the seas.
