Stupor Bowl

It just isn't the same on the other side of the pond. Instead of struggling to calculate the possibilities of possible outcomes, instead of analysing and overanalysing advantages, disadvantages, frogs and princes, the staff of Desultory Turgescence was sitting in the wind and rain at St Andrews Road watching a nerve-wracking 1-1, last minute draw between Birmingham and Newcastle. Riots were few but the lads from Newcastle in the stands fairly outchanted the Blue faithful from our end of the corner right beside the visitors beach of black and white.

In any event, I did scratch out a brief, yet brilliant analysis and prediction, out of the sheer need of habituality which can be found here -- to cut to the chase, so to speak, the final score is planned out as:

Carolina 20 New England 16

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"There are very few human beings who
receive the truth, complete & staggering,
by instant illumination. Most of them
acquire it fragment by fragment, on a
small scale, by successive developments,
cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

? Anais Nin

Matt Nosanchuk, a campaign worker, after the Manchester rally. "But it's about electability.

People would vote for a cat if he could beat George Bush."

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Another Heaping Dollop of Bias, Please

After all the weeks and weeks of hubbub, speculation and greedy anticipation, it turns out the Hutton Report evolved into little than a corrupted Whitewash, a Tony Blair cheerleading convention of one-sided judgements that no one except the pampered pricks at 10 Downing Street would take seriously.

Not surprisingly, departing BBC Director General Greg Dyke said Lord Hutton had "given the benefit of doubt to every government witness and not to any at the BBC"

Seriously though, whilst one might expect the losing side to belittle the spoils of the victors, Hutton's report was a better example of spindoctoring than impartial, judicial weighing of facts.

Meanwhile, back in the Lair of Evil, the house of neocon cards is starting to waver as even President Jesus Bush now has to bow to reality on occasion. Of course, you needn't hold your breath in expectation of a fair and unbiased inquiry:

"By joining the effort to create the commission rather than allowing Congress to develop its framework on its own, Bush will likely have more leverage to keep the focus on the CIA and other intelligence agencies rather than on the White House. Democrats have asserted that Bush exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq to justify going war, a theory that was boosted by recent allegations from former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill that Bush had contemplated Hussein's ouster long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

And if it's democracy you're after, better not look at Iraq any time soon:

Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami expressed what hundreds of millions of Muslims are feeling all over the world: "The American administration invaded Afghanistan to find [Osama] bin Laden, where is bin Laden? The Americans occupied Iraq under the pretext of installing democracy and finding weapons of mass destruction. Where are these weapons and where is democracy?" Khatami also revealed how Iran is closely monitoring the confrontation between the proconsul and the marja: "Ayatollah Sistani demanded direct democracy, and the Americans refuse it. That's what we have always proposed, one man, one vote." Also in Davos, John Ruggie, professor of international affairs at Harvard and an adviser to Annan, has been far from enthusiastic: "The Bush administration has not changed. The Americans' attitude does not incite anybody to cooperate with them."

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Free Verse:

In a 1956 Newsweek interview poet Robert Frost, asked about writing free verse, snaps:

"I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

No Free Verse:

The Censored Ad: Cute Children Doing Difficult Work


The ad that CBS refused, claiming it has a policy that forbids advertising on ?controversial issues of public importance,? already has been aired in the Washington, D.C., market and elsewhere. It was the winning ad in the ?Bushin30Seconds? ad contest sponsored by theVoter Fund. The ad, one of some 1,500 entries, was created by Charlie Fisher of Denver and selected after 110,000 people viewed the ads on the internet and rated them.

It is a gentle, wordless ad in which cute children do difficult work ? cleaning office buildings, washing dishes, hauling garbage, standing on an assembly line ? to a background of a single guitar. The tagline is: ?Guess Who?s Going to Pay Off Bush?s $1 Trillion Deficit??

?CBS will show the world ads featuring women in bikinis mud wrestling, to sell beer. It will have ads for all three erectile dysfunction medicines. But it has decreed that a message about the federal deficit and the President?s leadership failures is off limits,? said Eli Pariser, national campaigns director for MoveOn.org Voter Fund. The network also refused an issue ad by People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.

the ad itself is found here

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