Hand & Face Paint

More faces here.

More Guido Daniele here.

Flag picture

We were staying at my in-laws on after 9-11 and the local paper printed a full-page color image of the flag, which we put up in the window.

Happy Independence Day!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Link to High-res image here:

Switched to BlogCounter

I switched to BlogCounter today and it seems to work just fine and is free!

The only drawback is that I was up to around 2400 (since March 7th 2007, when I put the old counter on) and now it is reset back to zero.

Digits.com -- Don't use them!

March 7th of 2007 I decided to put a counter onto the blog and chose Digits.com, mostly due to it being free. Well, it was worth the cost. Here were the problems:

--I would occasionally get a swarm of hits, as evidenced by GeoID and the site counter would not register it--so this decreases confidence in their numbers.

--The numbers would disappear every so often just leaving an error message.

--The last straw: They reset the counter to zero!

--Their useless counter is deleted from my template, never to return.

www.digits.com

Faceless 'aliens' spotted in crowd at Wimbledon

The interesting thing about the pictures that go with this article, is that nobody around the faceless people seems to notice them.

We are so blase' about odd-looking types that real space aliens could be among us and we wouldn't care--as long as they didn't make a nuisance of themselves or look too weird.

He really must think we are stupid

Problem is; he is probably right. Enough of "we" are probably stupid enough to not remember his approach during the primaries.

"My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I've said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe," Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota. "And my guiding approach continues to be that we've got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I'm going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold."

From the Washington Post story today.

The first sentence is honest and correct, he did say he was concerned about the troop's safety. The second one is at the very least misleading: "And my guiding approach continues to be that we've got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. In the primaries, he was quite clear that he didn't care about what happened if we left Iraq--getting the troops home was his be-all and end-all. At least that is the impression he wanted to convey to the Democratic true- believers.

From his own website:

In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.

Brings to mind the old GK Chesterton quote..

This story in The Wall Street Journal,

GLOBAL VIEW

By BRET STEPHENS

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis

July 1, 2008; Page A15

So reminds me of Chesterton--

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.

WALL-E

James Lileks reviews the new Pixar film and (as usual) hits it out of the park.

Their bravery has inspired me

An article in the New York Times: June 29, 2008 Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their Own By JODI KANTOR

It seems that some young followers of Senator Obama have the idea of changing their middle name to Hussein (not legally, just in facebook and places like that) to honor him and (supposedly) diffuse any negative connotation the name might have.

Some said they were inspired by movies, including “Spartacus,” the 1960 epic about a Roman slave whose peers protect him by calling out “I am Spartacus!” to Roman soldiers...

I don't know if you (my 6 readers) have seen the great film directed by Stanley Kubrick, but there was some real risk in being mistaken for Spartacus--The Romans planned to crucify him. The consequences of having Hussein as a middle name? Getting nominated by a major political party to run for president of the United States.

I know they think they are helping their man, and being brave & etc. But I hope it will occur to them that acting like cult members probably doesn't help with the broader public.