don't know why it took me so long to find this

the cats will be relieved; now I can feed them...

http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html

some of the things I came across when I was trying to find Prof. Blue Smush Dino Baby

It's a combination of the amusing and the disturbing.

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wargames.html

http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_09_07.html#007923

http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

http://stuarthughes.blogspot.com/2004/05/photo-of-day-from-mychele-daniau-of.html

http://members.tripod.com/~danharms/mythos.htm

http://www.cthulhu.org/cthulhu/positions.html

http://www.acslaw.org/events/junegore.htm

http://www.jihadunspun.com/articles/18122003-Iraqi-Resistence/ir/ailatir01.html

http://www.jihadunspun.com/articles/20030911-ashes.to.light/

...and I wonder where all my times goes...

BTW

Temperature down in the normal range since last night, but lingering shoulder and neck stiffness and endurance still around 75%. Helping Chris pack/unpack the car for the tailgate pretty much wiped me for half an hour or so. I had a nice time hanging with DG last night as they triaged their photos from Canada to see which ones they should get reprinted (the first place that printed them totally messed up the processing). But dinner was two pieces of whole wheat toast: all is not quite right in Gotham yet. But at least DCU kicked some (Dall)ass! :-)

ruminations on the owner of Jihad Unspun

I'm continuing to read this site, specifically the owner's personal testimony. It's fascinating. I find myslf more and more uncomfortable with her, the more I read about her. I'm struck by how she seems, by her own account, unable to move in anything except sudden, sweeping life-altering changes. Her story of going from being a crippled child to a fully functional teeanger to a rock-bottom addicted teenager, from a alcholic to an overnight, miraculously cured teetotaler, from a devout and utterly convinced Christian to a devout and utterly convinced Muslim: none of it sounds unbelieveable to me, but all of it taken together suggests to me someone who is fundamentally unstable and unable to operate without an absolute certainty of *something* (doesn't really matter what). Which makes me very reluctant to accept her judgement or her analysis of *anything*.

I'm also struck by how often the words "I had no idea" or "I knew nothing about" come into play, followed almost immediately by a sudden, rapid change of direction in her life story. More than anything, she seems to have lived most of her life without much knowledge of or interest in the world outside a very tight little ambit around herself. When this self-imposed barier was breached, she seems to have been overcome by all the information she had been either blocking out or allowing to pass her by for so many years, as if all of it had suddenly happened *just then* because it was just coming to her attention.

Another facet of her reaction to information: her seemingly unbounded arrogance. One of the best examples I've come across is her declaration "There was still one big problem as far as I was concerned and that was Christ, the Savior. Over a two week period, I research this whole matter extensively and it became very apparent that Christ could not be God and that God can not, by His very nature, have partners." There, that was easy. Humans have been chewing over that one for, oh, at least 5700-5800 years, longer if you go back before the monotheists; but this lady, with no theological, historical, anthropolgical background, no research training or (apparently) any higher education at all has figured it out in two weeks. Gee, what has mankind been wasting all its time over?

But what bothers me most is her black/white vision. She begins by saying that she wanted JUS to show "both sides" of the story. As if there were ever only *two* sides to any story that involveshuman beings! Then she goes further and adds that she wanted JUS to be a voice for Muslims (so, then, not wholly impartial?) Then she concludes by saying that she's convinced that the "war on terror" is a cover for a decades-old war on Islam that has been propogated by a desire for oil and which is based on 9/11, an event that she states the US government knew about beforehand and did nothing to stop. She then descends into gross hyperbole and name-calling worthy of an al Jazeera broadcast.

What makes the whole thing almost comic-opera, and what makes me wonder how much of the roots of this story are not total fabrication, is her shaky grasp of English. This is someone who claims to have been a publisher and web enterpreneur, but her text is filled with spelling errors, punctuation errors, other typos, and screaming grammatical errors that completely reverse the sense of what she's notionally saying, such as:

As long as Muslims allow the enemies of Islam to shred the very fabric of our beliefs that pits brother against brother, and we ignore the obligations Allah has prescribed for us and remain ignorant of our deen (religion), our Ummah will remain weak and we will continue to be the target of aggression.

I'm sorry, "the very fabric of our beliefs that pits brother against brother"? If that's what Islam is about, then I'lll pass; I'd prefer a religion that seeks to unite brother with brither. Is there really someone being held hostage out there somewhere who is trying to send SOS messages with text like this?

It's an interesting read, but it convinces me that JUS is a propaganda site; doesn't mean it's not still worth reading, but its claims to evenhandedness seem to me laughable.

a footnote

I find the whole exercise of reading through the page I was just commenting on rather sadly wearying, and upon starting to read Barnet's weblog entry for 9/11 I became even more wearied (partly because I disagree with Barnett about things, partly because I agree and that bothers me, but mostly because he's two years older than I am and has already held and left senior researcher or director positions at institutions I could barely get an entry-level job in today.)

But I feel it worth adding that I one of the reasons I am so bothered by the JUS owner's rantography is that at root I agree with her about many of the reasons the United States finds itself in the position it is in today. We have been arrogant; we have sided with the strong against the weak, the invader against the dweller, the tyrant against the peasant. Of course, remember the French Revolution: the peasant is not always a much worthier or generous person than the tyrant. But we have been our own worst enemy.

What frustrates me is that, especially knowing as little as I do about Arab culture, I'm not sure I know what we could have done differently that would have made us seem less of an enemy and more of an ally. We love to believe that we brought an end to the Cold War and "liberated" eastern Europe from communism. But do Russians think of us as friends and allies? My impression is they still see us as a vagely threatening, distant, unknowable Whore of Babylon--rich, seductive, destructive. How coudl we have done better with the Arab world?

yay! accomplishment!

I got the shelves up in the laundry room closet. Lots of mistakes along the way in this project, from not thinking to check where the folding doors will go if I ever put them back (whch would require probably either replacing the doors themselves or tearing out the carpeting in the room and replacing it--the carpet installer ludicrously suggested sanding them; yeah, moron, how would you like to *sand* 1/2" to 3/4" off the bottom of a series of folding doors? Didn't think so) and thus getting shelves that, in such an eventuality will probably prove too big, to somehow measuring the width of the closet wrong (fortunately thinking it was narrower than it is rather than the other way around), to drilling the first set of holes wrong, to assuming that there were no studs in that section of wall because all the places that I had tested in which the stud finder (a tool no household should be without!) said there was a stud had in fact nothing but drywall. However, all done, finally. Mistakes corrected for one way or another, and three sets of shelves hung. I'll just transfer the stuff I want to move out of my bedroom closet (where I'll now have more room than I know what to do with! maybe enough room for a GF to keep some clothes for the occasional sleepover :-) need to find the GF first, though :-) and into the new space.

Also need to soak one corner of the laundry room closet with cat-pee-neutralizing stuff. Ugh. No idea how cats can get pee onto the floor of a closet when there's stuff in the way without leaving a trace. I mean, there was no smell before. I moved stuff into that corner. Said stuff was never disturbed (had dust on it today when I moved it). Yet a few days ago a strong *odor* began eminating that hadn't before and, for sure, there's a nasty dampness there. Bleah!

Then, ho! for half an hour in the hammock with a book before a quick shower. Didn't (again) get the kitchen or bathroom cleaned as I had hoped to do; well, I warned poor D the place was a bit scruffy! :-)

whew!

Done. The idea here was to get all my boardgames in one place. More work than I thought. I know I want to slim down my game collection some (the RPGs and mini rules have their own, much smaller closet; the cards are going to need a shelf or somethign of their own; and the minis have, well, *cough* a good portion of the basement), but I think I should make it a priority to decide which games are to go and get them on eBay. In the meantime, there won't hopefully be a horrible ripping, tearing crashing sound tonight as the shelves pull off the walls... :-) <--nervous smile

Now, for a shower. And change the kd lang for something else. Doesn't seem to be quite what I was looking for just now; acutually a little grating.