Day: March 16, 2005

Underground SA

I’ve been getting a goodly number of hits from Saudi Arabia resulting from folks (guys, I would assume) searching for a phrase in Arabic (found in “No shoot, Sherlock”) that translates “filthy whore.” (I used the term in a fictitious quote of one of the Iraqi “room mates” of the supposedly kidnapped Italian commie “journalist.”)

Hmmmm… A yahoo search for a term that indicates some guys in Saudi are looking for porn (something that’s supposedly a SEVERE no-no in S.A.). Searches for the same Arabic term are also showing up from Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, the UAE, Israel (?!?), Holland, Sweden and… Illinois. *sigh*

Well, at least they’re not finding what they’re looking for here.

And… the searches from the Arabic countries indicate a possible ripe field for, um, missions. (Not being good little Muslim boys, now are we? Eh? *heh*)

And so it goes…

“Sign zee papers, old man!”**

Glenn Reynolds notes, in his latest Tech Central column, that

“… if you haven’t been convicted of some felony or other, it’s probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven’t committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not.”

Indeed. We have reached the point where the only thing standing [between] a citizen (like maybe a pushy, perhaps even obnoxious, broad, say, Martha Stewart?) with rights and a convicted felon whose rights have been stripped, modified or severely curtailed is the time, personal taste and/or whim of a prosecutor.

That means that, in essence, what we think of as rights are really only priviledges temporarily granted by a government that can strip us of those rights any time it truly wishes to do so.

And nearly as bad as “felony inflation” as laws seem to grow like vicious and rabid tribbles, is the actions of judges who issue new law (usually, it seems, after reading tea leaves and goat entrails) by fiat, as Thomas Sowell notes in the first of three recent articles dealing with trouble on the bench:

“While people in various countries in the Middle East are beginning to stir as they see democracy start to take root in Iraq, our own political system is moving steadily in the opposite direction, toward rule by unelected judicial ayatollahs, acting like the ayatollahs in Iran.”

Welcome to the Imperium.

**(My thx to Cheech n Chong for the perfect image of the new order: “Sign zee papers old man!”… “But I cannot sign the papers”…much intervening dialog… “Why not?” “Because you have cut off all my fingers!”)

I’ve reached that awkward age…

…where I can no longer read a book, watch TV, listen to the stereo and carry on a conversation simultaneously. And I don’t have anyone to play chess with at the same time, now, either.

Ah, well. I suppose it has something to do with leaving adolescence behind me, now that I’m in my 50s.

Completely Stupid Idea

One of the many reasons I strongly dislike CSI and its cousin TV shows can be found, illustrated and explained in moderate depth for a layman’s understanding, here .

“Chris Enzler from Cognitech says, ‘you won’t get a perfect picture, that’s Hollywood. You will get a good picture, but you can only reconstruct so much. You almost never get a nice tape – some videotapes have been recorded over 100 times. Banks and other stores try to be cheap, and too many people expect stuff from the movies or CSI.’

Chris gave several examples of Hollywood magic that doesn’t work in real life. One example is from a recent CSI episode, where the video investigator rotated a car in 3D to read the license plate, from a 2D video. In other shows you see the investigators enhance a single pixel to a full screen, with perfect clarity, which is obviously impossible.”

Of course, all the other reasons I avoided the show(s) after the first couple of episodes I watched in order to give it a fair viewing are moot since Rathergate. Since Rathergate, I’ve sworn off ALL CBS programming, including local programming from our CBS affiliate.

Haven’t missed a thing.

Of course, CSI is now in syndication on other channels, but that just makes narrowing down my viewing options (which sometimes narrow down to nothing, which is itself no loss) easier.

Now, if only someone could get through to NBC that cloning ever dumber versions of Law & Order is a waste of otherwise valuable programming time… “SVU” was bad enough, but “Criminal Intent” with weird boy Onofrio gave me a rash. I dread discovering what the new version-that-should-not-be-named might turn out to be like…

Nah. No dread. More TLC and History Channel. That’ll do the trick.