in case anyone cares, I did do monday, tuesday and wednesday NYT, they capitulated with relatively little fight. i was moderately challenged by today’s puzzle, but finished it off in less than 20 minutes. God, think of the guys who’ll do a puzzle like that in less than a minute. I don’t even think I can write that fast….
Monday I did in about 8 minutes. I’m getting closer to being able to do a really easy puzzle in 8 times the amount of time it takes good puzzledoers to fill in a really hard puzzle. that kind of made me a little sad. sniff

i hope life is kind to yall

When asked if there was anyone who can get him to stop his independent run for Senate:

LIEBERMAN: Respectfully, no. I am committed to this campaign, to a different kind of politics, to bringing the Democratic Party back from Ned Lamont, Maxine Waters to the mainstream, and for doing something for the people of Connecticut. That’s what this is all about: which one of us, Lamont or me, can do more for the future of our people here in Connecticut. And on that basis, I’m going forward with confidence, purpose and some real optimism.

Taking the party back from the guy who just beat you in a primary? Joe, you’re the fucking establishment. The party is taking itself back from YOU, you dick! Shut your fuckin’ piehole, got to the big-money DNC/DSCC donors, kiss them square on the anus and tell them thanks for keeping you in office for 18 years, and RETIRE, DICK.

Uh, and Maxine? If she’s the one Joe wants to take the party from, well, I’m gonna say it again: FUCK YOU JOE. What happened to the freedom-bus rider? The guy who stuck his neck out for principle? Your principle can be summed up in a couple words now: Cash fucking money. You dick.
Maxine is a hell of a congressperson, and if she helped oust your ass, then I’m sending her a donation today.

Atrios posts this from the DSCC:

“The Democratic voters of Connecticut have spoken and chosen Ned Lamont as their nominee. Both we and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) fully support Mr. Lamont’s candidacy. Congratulations to Ned on his victory and on a race well run.
“Joe Lieberman has been an effective Democratic Senator for Connecticut and for America. But the perception was that he was too close to George Bush and this election was, in many respects, a referendum on the President more than anything else. The results bode well for Democratic victories in November and our efforts to take the country in a new direction.”

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE? My ASS “more than anything else”. How about this?

“In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital,”

That was explaining his opposition to the “morning after” pill, specifically affirming his belief that hospitals can choose NOT to fill prescriptions or provide emergency contraceptives (on a side note, notice the word “contraceptive”. that means no babies are harmed. But the religious right is not interested in saving babies, but in controlling lives. That kind of proves it, their dislike of contraceptives).
Joe also helped destroy the fillibuster (we saved it so we can never use it, we’re so great!), push through bankruptcy “reform” (screw you poor people!) and get Alito and Roberts nominated (loves him some wingnuts). Joe sucked. He practically fellated Cheney in the 2000 debate, while savaging Ned in debates. Joe only has a spine when criticizing fellow Democrats.
And of course his support of Bush and his disastrous military adventurism is hard to deny. Lieberman coming out and saying “Things are peachy in Iraq!” is insane. Imagine if thousands (relative numbers) of people were being killed in the US every day because of terrorist attacks and religious warfare. You think a fucking school getting painted is going to make the news you dick? I don’t. I think the headlines might read something like “Thousands Killed, Holy Fucking Shit!”
I know Joe’s a corpse. He can still fuck up the election in his stinky corpse-ness by running as an independent. He has no chance of winning, but it would likely put a Republican in the Senate from Connecticut. So if Joe wants to take out the last bit of his legacy, pour gas over it, and burn it on top of the ashes of his credibility, then an independent run is the way to go. (Note: Confirmed, Joe is running as an independent. Fuck you Joe)
Joe’s independent run basically proves all he cares about is staying in power. This is the Zidane of politics….long distinguished career, goin’ down in flames at the end. Him and DeLay. I think I’ll call him Joe “Zizsou” Lieberman from now on. Fucking dickhead.

i oppose war. i opposed the bombing of afghanistan, based on nothing more than my feeling that it was fucked up, and that it wouldn’t accomplish shit. it was, and it didn’t. i opposed the current iraq bullshit our kids are fucked in. i opposed kosovo, i opposed fucking panama, grenada, the international terrorism supported and managed by our government in every poor resource-rich country in the world.
did you know it took years to get the across-the-board resistance to the vietnam war that ended up defining a generation? and before any hostilities were statred there were MILLIONS protesting around the world over the fucked-up Iraq invasion plan. not a shot fired. 12 years of ruinous (to the iraqi people, not the disgusting US-supported dictator) sanctions had given people an idea of what was coming, i’d imagine, but still, there was not the “grace period” of a few years of unremitting violence, including bombing civilians, initiating free-fire zones, and chemical warfare that the government had in vietnam. it was instantaneous. millions around the world marched the streets.
the news coverage? ZILCH.
that’s all kind of an aside. war is stupidity. its worse. war is anti-human. if you’re a human being, and you believe human beings are worthwhile, war is the ultimate worst thing there’s ever been. period. that’s what i think anyways. and it’s right.

we’re doing a mural of a pirate map over my fireplace.

sunday is a big pussy. i defeated it after a passage of time at the local starbucks. it took an hour, but it was just…drudgery. there was a couple of couples of old people talking about africa in the table behind me. they began talking about sushi and i tried to make a comment, but they looked at me like i was insane.
i don’t have anything good to say otherwise. the puzzle gave up its treats like an easy chick on prom night.

today i went after the saturday puzzle, the king of all NYT puzzles. I didn’t go in with monster expectations, i’ve often failed at this one. i headed over to Penny Lane in San Marcos to set up my camp and go to battle. i’d had to do some moving from our office storage unit and was a little sweaty and uncomfortable, but relaxed with the gentle caress of Stella.
Here’s the scene:

beer, smokes, puzzle. the pilot precise was champing at the bit to enter the fight, so i let loose after a swig of Stella Artois. At first I had nothing…the puzzle yielded only a could short clues, and the vast expanse of unfilled squares mocked me for about half an hour. at last, i returned fire and managed to fill in the bottom right corner.

one thing about puzzles, your first impression is often right. that makes it awful when you’re wrong, and the first impression is way off, which happened to me on this puzzle. the clue “the opposite of relaxed” seemed simple. “tense”, five letters, let’s go. but it turned out to be wrong, the correct answer was “antsy”. so blah.
The rest of the puzzle looked impossible. i probed constantly, running possibilities through my head. i kept running into small squares i’d filled in wrong, like when i put “SPRINKLES” in (it ended up being “splatters” “falls in drops”. I began to lose hope for this one. at some point, you begin to think you can’t make it. you’re two hours into a puzzle, and you just start to think “that’s it, i gave it my best”. I even capped my pen and talked with the bar back for a while, a nice guy named Pat. a huge group of people showed up for some kind of birthday party in a chartered bus. i actually sat for about an hour just ignoring the puzzle, trying to psyche it out.
at some point, you give up and fill in things you’re not sure about. i try to visualize the whole thing before filling in letters, but sometimes it’s just obfuscated, it’s behind a fog. so i just threw a couple guesses in there. i knew, inside, i’d given up.
but to my surprise the guesses were right. they started the wonderful fall of dominoes that can lead to you filling out a whole grid in minutes. there’s a competitive crossword series called the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Ken Jennings won a lower division challenge recently (the guy who won millions for weeks on Jeopardy!). These guys literally fill in the hardest puzzles in minutes, or faster. I heard an NPR interview with a winner who filled in a huge saturday-sized puzzle in less than a minute. i wish.
so after my last-gasp guesses, i ended up finishing, to a small amount of amazement on my part. so for the week, i ended up finishing all but one puzzle, going from sunday to saturday. the loss on a wednesday puzzle was odd, but the NYT is a mean beast, and can strike with vengeance at random moments.
all in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

(i wrote “is my bitch” after “New York Times”)

Here:

And am I the only one that noticed that Mike Myers in the Cat in the Hat makeup is a childhood vision of horror? If this god damn nature-taunting cat man was a howling scorpion with my father’s face riding the blood-soaked ghost of Joseph Stalin I couldn’t be more terrified of it.

I just had a seangasm.

*note: while true, this post is totally ridiculous. i like it that way.

i sit a lot, trying to stay chill, trying not to bust holes in the wall. i do a lot of crossword puzzles. humiliating my friends at games like scrabble and trivial pursuit is one of my favorite hobbies. tried throwing myself into my work and found that shit bores me a lot of the time. so the NYT crossword is like my daily challenge. it gets harder as the week progresses, generally peaking on saturday. the sunday puzzle is larger, but in my experience not as hard. just big.
today i went to the starbucks by my work on my lunch break and busted out mr. friday, by my formula the second-hardest puzzle of the week. usually i’m about 75% finishing fridays. monday through thursday are generally gimmes (except this wednesday’s, which dominated me) but fri-sat is the evil axis of devastating puzzledom.
often you don’t have to even look at the clues to know how hard a puzzle will be…if the grid has few black squares, and from a bit back has a lighter feel to it, you could be in trouble. this is indicative of a lot of long, long words/phases with fewer opportunities to fill in chunks with shorter words overlapping a lot. today’s friday had a definite lack of black squares. it was whiter than beverly hills.
well, i’m not letting some puzzle scare me am i? a little. perhaps a small whimper of fear escaped my quivering lip. but i bore ahead bravely, dove into the fray, etc. wielding my pen as a sabre, i scanned the field of battle for vulnerable enemies. while it presented an imposing front, there were weaknesses, and i quickly moved to exploit them. the bottom left began immediately to buckle under the weight of my assault, and discovering a 3 letter “asian holiday” (tet) afforded me an opportunity to rout the enemy from this part of the field. with the center of the line holding, i moved to the bottom of the grid, and scored a coup when i filled in a long one (“staring into space”) and the bottom fell, though not without a hard-fought battle.
one way to tell if you’ve done a good job on the puzzle is to see how clean it is when you’re done. if you have written over words again and again trying to find out what the right one is, you’ve fucked up, and deserve to be sent to a corner. as an aside: never use a pencil. it shows weakness, and the New York Times crossword puzzle can smell weakness from several newspaper racks over. use only pen, preferably one with a strong, clear black line. i prefer rollerball pens, the pilot precise V5 to be specific.
anyhow, my top third of the puzzle today was riddled with errors. i incorrectly remembered the german word for “high” (its 4:20 zumvere, ya?), putting “alte” (the word for “old”) instead of “hoch”. the bitterness in my mouth was unbearable. the battle was turning against me, and my lunch hour was dwindling. i became desperate, scanning the three long, grid-wide across clues that composed the top three lines of the puzzle. “Deviant, in a way” “You know…that woman.” ‘there are no options”. I could think of nothing. the corpses of several incorrectly filled squares led me to chase many red herrings, feints and counter feints in the blood-soaked grid of battle. i feared i would lose this conflict, my pen forced to flee the field. morale plummeted and my hand shook with exertion.
all of a sudden, as a lone raven flew overhead, it struck me. “Deviant, in a way”. SADOMASOCHISTIC. the random letters i’d managed congealed in my head and i let out a fierce whoop of bloodlust. i bore down on the now-shattered puzzle, routing its armies from the plain. “You know…that woman” OLDWHATSHERNAME. there are no options….YOUHAVENOCHOICE. My victory was complete.
i sat back. and looked around. i get very intent when i’m doing puzzles and often miss things happening around me. if there had been a pterodactyl attack, i would have been fucked. thankfully, no ancient flying dinosaurs were menacing my local starbucks. i had a smoke to calm my nerves, still singing with the joy of combat.
then i got up and threw the paper away, and made my way back to work. i wondered…do the passing drivers know? can they see it in my face?

then i realized it’s highly probable i’m completely insane. i had a little chuckle over that, but it was interrupted by a ferocious pterodactyl attack. ah, but that’s a tale for another day.

on august 19 1998 the US launched missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan, in response to terrorist attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. the Sudan missiles destroyed the Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries factory, and its owner’s assets were frozen by the US Treasury Department, as his factory was accused of producing/hiding/harboring chemical weapons. Eight months later, to no notice in the US media, the government unblocked the owner’s (Saudia Arabian Salih Idris) assets with the admission that the bombing had been a mistake.
i haven’t found direct evidence of the efficacy of the Afghanistan bombings, and thus can’t comment on it. But the attack in Sudan was ridiculous and caused death and suffering for many people. The fact that the world’s lone superpower felt it necessary to unload advanced munitions against a factory that it had no credible evidence to suggest was dangerous constitutes, in my mind, a war crime. From Media Monitors:

The ultimate consequences of the U.S. missile attack on Sudan has been the ongoing death of thousands of innocent Sudanese civilians who due to the destruction of the al-Shifa plant, have no access to medicines that would otherwise have been made easily available by the plant. The death toll, in other words, of the U.S. missile attack, has continued to increase to this day.

Try reversing positions, and imagine a Sudanese warship had launched missiles into the US and destroyed medical and pharmaceutical facilities. The response would be unequivocal and devastating, and the nation of Sudan would likely have been wiped off the face of the earth. But this does not enter into the equation. This was a terroist act. The Sudanese government asked for an apology. Needless to say, none has been forthcoming for the last eight years.
This is justice? ask the parents of the dead children.

The Independent Onlinearticle(archived at Refuse and Resist!)
What Really Happened?