former Texas lt. governor ashamed, apologetic

garked from motherall

In a video originally posted on the Web by a pro-Kerry organization in Austin, Texas, Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, apologized for his role in getting a young George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard while young men who were not from prominent or wealthy families "died in Vietnam."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/27/barnes/index.html

While the press apparently takes a pass

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/30/barnes_update/index.html

(not entirely true: the WaPo ran a wire service story on Sunday: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42628-2004Aug28.html But, yes, it's not the same as the coverage of the SBVFT slanders.)

john_arundel this one's for you

I've got just the perfect Xmas present lined up for you...

ah, the world of alternative crossovers...

from Issue 9 of The Scourer, the newletter of the British Lance and Longbow Society

a response to a question on the accuracy of information imparted by a reenactor...

I must, in all fairness, say that I have a lot of respect for re-enactors and I do get to meet a lot of them as there is a fair crossover between re-enactors and the British consensual adult S&M scene. [Many of the Lance and Longbow Society members already know that I am also ex-chairman of the SM Pride campaign for consensual sadomasochism]. (Ed. Barry, If they didn’t, they do now!). On the S&M scene we have several well-known Vikings, many Sealed Knot and other ECW society members [my friend Zoe the Goth is a musketeer!] and I was at the SM Pride Annual Ball in 1999 when two members of The White Company started lovingly unwrapping the polished sallet, bevor and pauldrons they had just collected from an armourer who was living just down the road. However one of Britain's most famous S&M 'masters' also freely admits to me that he completely invented the 'famous' Royalist Sealed Knot regiment of which he was colonel for several years! He even wrote a fake regimental history which none of the 'experts' on the ECW scene ever challenged! So one sort of fantasy can breed another!

SBD check

Went to the gym today. Scale says 266, so down either 6 or 10 pounds, depending on where I count when I started. That's with a big cheat yesterday (lunch with a friend after a tough morning for him ended up including a couple of beers and some zabaglione for dessert, to go with my trout and veg entree). I was hoping for a little more than that, but as long as the rest of this week sees off a fwe more pounds, I'll have managed in the range they suggest for the first phase. Not sure if I want to do one more week of it to see if I can get a bit more fast push, or move on to phase 2, the 1-2 pounds a week trimming part.

In related news, I tried my James Beard fish technique with some flounder the other night, and it failed miserably. I ate the fish, but only because I couldn't bear to have bought it and cooked it not finish it. The texture was nasty and the flavor not very appetizing. Either I need to do something else with flounder or it's just nasty.

RNC

Despite my best intentions, I haven't been watching this. I did hear some interviews by WAMU's Kojo Nmadi on his show the other day that really confirmed my low opinion of the Republicans as a group. He was talking to some running for legislative offices who are seen as up-and-coming Rep stars. One asserted, in answer to Kojo's question about the effect the candidate thought Bush's popularity would have in his race or vice versa, "Well, Kojo, I'm not running for any individual; I'm running for [candidate's own name]." Uh, OK.

Another fellow (I think the chap challenging Barbara Mikulski for her seat in Maryland) gave a long explanation for his support of Bush's proposed federal marriage amendment, which involved the usual "activist judges" quotes and eventually boiled down to "I support states' rights, so I think the federal constitution needs to be changed because otherwise the states can't exercise their rights." Yeah, that was hardly transparent.

A third person, a woman, was being interviewed about the contrast between the way Democrats had distinguished the war on terror from the war on Iraq and the way Republicans were treating it all as one big event. Wasn't that conflating two different things that even the president had admitted were not directly connected? Her reply: no, he [Bush] had gone in there and pulled the terrorists like Saddam out of their holes; he'd set himself a goal and he'd succeeded and everything was settled and we were much safer now with all of the terrorists behind bars and the war pretty much done and over. Does this person even live on the same planet with the rest of us?

It's not the Republicans who have the lock on dopiness, though. I was listening to an article on Democracy Now this morning about the protests in NYC, and the reporters (who, it being Pacifica, seemed not entirely sure where the line between reporting on and participating in the protests was) seemed to think that the msot succssful event of the day, the one that had accomplished the most and of which they were very proud, was a "direct action" (pretentious, a little?) that had generated so much noise during the outdoor filming of an MSNBC feature on finance that the feature had been move inside. (what the producers were thinking staging something outside in NYC at all, let alone during a convention, I have no idea.) Wow, guys! You shut down a TV program! Next step world peace, right?

interesting

http://beowulf-movie.com/