Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

and lift a cold one to his memory. Colonel Michael Singleton would have done the same for you.
(Assuming of course that you were worthy…which apparently was not a given.)

Unusually for a magistrate, he rolled his own cigars and brewed a potent beer. His funeral eulogy reported long-standing rumours that Singleton was also familiar with the workings, and product, of a “not entirely licensed still”.

I wish I’d known him…
Via the Corner.

John Edwards thinks he can play with the big boys:

“In two short years, George W. Bush has taught us what the W stands for: Wrong. Wrong for our children, wrong for families, wrong for our values, wrong for America.”

And J.E. stands for JACKASS EEEEEEDIOT!
Like we’d ever vote for a trial lawyer for president.

but I am REALLY tired of hearing “BONG” followed by more breathless news about the club fire in Rhode Island.
Sure, it was terrible. It’s a damn shame so many have died.
BUT ISN’T THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT’S GODDAMN NEWSWORTHY TODAY?
If it bleeds, it leads…apparently more at Fox than anywhere else. Too bad they’re the only news channel worth watching.
(Oh, one more thing: I actually heard a Fox newsbabe (not sure which one, I was in the office and the TV is in the living room) compare this disaster to 9/11. I shit you not.)

say “Amen!”

Via the Professor, crowd numbers at the San Francisco protests last weekend weren’t as high as the organizers would like you to think: Perhaps 65,000 as opposed to nearly a quarter million.

When told of The Chronicle’s survey, Alex S. Jones, the director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said, “The number of people (in a crowd) is a mythical number, and now you’re going to turn it into a fact, and that won’t be welcomed.”
Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the New York Times, added, “There’s an old saying in journalism: People only see what they believe. This is an emotional issue, not a factual issue as far as most people are concerned.”

Only a lefty journalist in academia would believe this.

“Oh my word. Come on, that’s ridiculous,” said Bill Hackwell, spokesman for International ANSWER, one of the groups that organized Sunday’s march and rally.

Only a commie would say something like this.
Even the police don’t believe it:

Greg Suhr, the San Francisco deputy police chief who calculated the police figure, said of The Chronicle’s estimate, “I can tell you for a fact that’s an enormously low number. (Pacific Bell Park), just in the stands, holds 40,000. The crowd at Pac Bell would pale in comparison to the crowd on Sunday.”

From the ground you might believe this. From the air, I think it would be a different story. And apparently it was:

The photographs, however, indicate otherwise. The series of images were shot in a 30-second sweep by the crew from Air Flight Service over the march and rally areas at 1:45 p.m. Peak attendance was between 1:30 and 2 p.m., Hackwell said.
At the time the photographs were taken, many people had gathered in the plaza, and the head of the march was at McAllister Street. The tail was near Sansome Street, and no side street was full enough to count, said Jack Barcelona, who runs the air photo firm.
Overlaying the photographs with a grid, surveyors from Air Flight Service estimated crowd density in the plaza and along the route. Each grid was evaluated and assigned a density of people, from 10 percent to 100 percent full. Most were judged at 25 percent or 50 percent full. This is the first time the firm has used its equipment for crowd estimation.
In comparison, both police and rally organizer figures are based on estimates of previous crowd sizes and on eye-level approximations of the event Sunday.

Further down:

No officers were assigned to count the crowd.
“It’s pretty much me,” Suhr said.

So you came up with an estimate that was conveniently near the A.N.S.W.E.R. number…big surprise.
This is just an amazing article…the entire methodology is pretty much explained, and it makes a great deal of sense to me.

“This methodology gives you the best results under the circumstances,” said Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, referring to fixed-camera aerial photos. The center specializes in photographing large tracts of land from space satellites for various projects such as looking for groundwater in the Sahara.
Miscounts of large crowds are common, El-Baz said, even such disparity as calling a crowd of 50,000 a crowd of 200,000.
“It’s unbelievable, but it happens consistently,” he said. “If you are in a demonstration yourself, you can easily be misled because you see so many people.”

As the Professor would say: Indeed.

Cougar

What Is Your Animal Personality?
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Got a hit on a Google search from Germany for “Fuck France”.
It came from an eu.int domain…which is of course the European Union. I can trace it all the way to 212.190.220.46, which is gw.europeesparlment.customers.uunet.be, so I assume without further data that it’s probably an official EU computer.
[Clarification: I should note that the search came via google.de (thus, Germany) and the computer on which the search was done was probably in Belgium (which of course is not Germany). I know what I meant to say, the search came from Google’s German portal; it just didn’t come out that way :)]

Turkey wants $30 billion in aid before she’ll let us use her territory to step off against Iraq.
Saddam owes the Russians $9 billion. (I keep hearing that number on Fox, I don’t have a link.)
I say we offer the Russians a cool $9 billion, plus $6 billion as a bonus, to switch sides and back us in the UN. And tell the Turks to get ready for an independent Kurdistan on their southeastern border.
Any American who doesn’t get on board with a 50% sale price is clearly a traitor 🙂 $15 billion is chump change to us, but we should never pay a dime to those who try to extort money from us.

Iraqi ‘terror ships’ at sea

Three huge cargo ships feared to be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are being tracked around the world by British and American intelligence.
The vessels, which have been at sea for three months, are believed to be carrying weapons smuggled out through Syria or Jordan.
They are all refusing frequent requests to provide details of their cargo or destination and officials are worried that the vessels are maintaining radio silence in clear contravention of maritime law, which states all ships should be in constant communication.

Well, they’re in international waters, and I don’t give a good God-damn about the so-called environmental issues, so perhaps three nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would take care of this little problem. Besides, you never know, they might be carrying Saddam’s gold.
Via the Corner.

Fox is covering, live, the rescue of a dog from an icy river.
I wish Fox would get serious. They report; I’ve decided that this story is pretty stupid and a serious waste of their news resources.
UPDATE: Rod Dreher at the Corner also noted this. No, Rod, you’ll get no flames from me. You’re absolutely correct.