Fox Atomic have officially ceased production on its remake of Revenge of the Nerds, according to Variety.
(AP) FOND DU LAC -- Some Fond du Lac parents have asked school officials to remove former U.S. poet laureate Maya Angelou's autobiography from the high school [emphasis mine] curriculum.
...parents have objected to passages that describe Angelou's rape and subsequent unwanted pregnancy.
Bush is "in a very tight spot," said Henri Barkey, a Lehigh University professor who was a State Department policy-planning expert on Iraq.
"I don't think, in modern American history, there is another example of such egregious failure of policy and execution. We're really seeing something unprecedented here. Even Vietnam was a slower decline, and the military forces were more in balance. ... I don't know anyone who thinks there is an outcome in Iraq now that is hopeful."
Security was tight amid reports that al Qaida-linked militants could try to disrupt Bush’s six-hour visit to the sleepy city of Bogor, just south of the capital, Jakarta, with thousands of rifle-toting soldiers patrolling the streets, mobile phone signals jammed, and water cannons deployed.
Demonstrations by Islamic hard-liners, students, housewives and taxi drivers have been staged every day this month and nearly 10,000 turned out to meet the US president today, some holding banners that said “Bush is a terrorist!” and “Go to Hell.”
Others called him a war criminal and chanted “Allah Akbar” or “God is great.”
Students in at least two cities tried to seal off American-owned restaurants, sometimes clashing with police.
America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership -- not an American divine mission.
[MA Gov. Mitt ("Mitt")] Romney, who opted not to run for a second term as governor this year, is nearing a decision on whether to seek the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.Romney's running. He decided a long time ago. Also a long time ago - a longer long time, no doubt - he decided he'd be willing to trash the state if that would help him get what he wants.
"In principle it could make almost any item that people want."
(Washington Post) - It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time.
Nearly 2.2 million Americans now live behind bars, about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world....
Approximately 60 percent of U.S. convicts serve time for charges related to drug peddling and addiction.
LONDON (AFP) - A 72-year-old man escaped with minor injuries when he drove his car over a 30 metre (100 foot) cliff before landing on the beach below, police said.
The proposals set up a likely clash between the new Democratic Congress and the Bush administration, which has sent strong signals that it will seek big savings in Medicaid next year.
(NetworkWorld) - Results of a high-tech research project to be released next week promise to finally unravel much of the remaining mystery of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator....
But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century B.C....
The team includes astrophysicists, radio astronomers, mathematicians and philologists (philology is the study of ancient texts and original documents), reflecting the complexity of the Antikythera Mechanism.
[There's] something deeply wrong with George W. Bush's presidency...
...mentioned in the next post down.ORLANDO, Fla. - There was hardly a run on snow shovels, but a few flakes of the white stuff hit the ground in Orlando for the first time since 2003, meteorologists said.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- Hollywood actress Jessica Alba was named the ideal celebrity to be a substitute teacher, a poll by the National Education Association found....
"Our celebrity Substitute Educators Day poll is an excellent way for us to spotlight the collective contributions of substitutes to schools nationwide," said NEA President Reg Weaver.
A presenter at a technology conference demonstrates a new idea for designing a computer interface.In case you haven't noticed, this is the last day of the first three days of the week. Which, I think, right there, makes it a good time to take a little break from reading the news. So I haven't been. Much. So far. And what I have been - reading, I mean - has been so uniformly, dismally depressing I haven't felt like posting any of it. But I'm making spaghetti for supper so that'll get me going again.
First Daughter Barbara Bush had her purse and cell phone stolen as she had dinner in a restaurant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, even though she was being guarded by a detail of Secret Service agents, according to law enforcement reports made available to ABC News.
(Lexington Herald-Leader) - Radicalized, the flower children morphed into lefty loonies who now masquerade as social progressives. No matter what they rename themselves, however, their agenda hasn't changed.Be on the lookout for geezers with pony tails.
Also, thank freaking goodness Stephen got himself a nuclear weapon already! Am I the only one who’d been waiting for that to happen for kind of a long time?! Sure, there are a lot of countries with the bomb, but all of those countries are weighed down by checks and balances and citizen populations and blah blah et cetera! Hello, can anyone say red tape?! Finally there’s someone with an H-bomb who can just up and set his off if the situation demands that kind of decisive action. Hooray!
(NINEMSN) - Marathon runners may face an increased risk of skin cancer, Austrian researchers report.
HONOLULU Nov 21, 2006 (AP)— President Bush will have breakfast with the troops at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii today and get a briefing from senior officers before heading back to Washington after an eight-day Asian trip.
I don't know if Walter Cronkite served in World War II or the Korean War, but Walter Cronkite can come on and talk about the Tet offensive...So here you go, Joe. From the Museum of Broadcast Communications:
...in 1939 Cronkite joined United Press (UP) to cover World War II. There, as part of what some reporters fondly called the "Writing 69th," he went ashore on D-Day, parachuted with the 101st Airborne, flew bombing mission over Germany, covered the Nuremburg trials, and opened the UP's first post-war Moscow bureau.
(ITWorld) - A virus has infected a virtual world, and there’s no Matrix like Neo saviour in sight, flying around the world zapping the bug with his super matrix-y powers. Instead, Second Life’s technicians needed to take the world offline over the weekend and clean it of all sings of the virus before turning it all back on again.
The World of Warcraft virtual world was attacked recently...
(ANANOVA) - At least 70 people have absconded from a controversial open prison this year, the Home Office said.
OBERLIN, Ohio - "He's gone way overboard this time," [shop owner Charlie] Palmer said of artist Keith McGuckin. "A few of his other displays were on the edge, but never that crazy."
CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP) - An iPod screen glowing in the middle of the night from thick underbrush led rescuers to a mushroom picker lost in the woods.
BISMARCK, North Dakota - Three men protesting the presence of weapons of mass destruction in North Dakota were sentenced Thursday to federal prison terms of over three years and ordered to pay $17,000 in restitution by a federal judge in Bismarck. The three dressed as clowns and went to the Echo-9 launch site of the intercontinental Minuteman III nuclear missile in rural North Dakota in June 2006. They broke the lock off the fence and put up peace banners and posters. One said: "Swords into plowshares - Spears into pruning hooks." They poured some of their own blood on the site, hammered on the nuclear launching facility and waited to be arrested....
The 40 ton Minuteman III site they damaged lies deep in rural North Dakota, at a site called Echo-9 about 100 miles north of Bismarck. Coiled beneath the surface of a bland concrete bunker, it is clearly visible from the gravel road. In fact, the otherwise pastoral countryside of farms and silos is full of nuclear weapon silos. One nuclear weapon launching site lies just across the road from a big farmhouse, another just down the road from a camp for teens. There are 150 other such nuclear launching facilities in North Dakota alone.
NEW YORK - After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special "If I Did It."
"I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. "We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."...
For the publishing industry, the cancellation of "If I Did It" was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," but a book's removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.
(GamePolitics.com) - American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…
So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country...
I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?
If...things aren’t getting better on the ground or there’s not a really plausible change of tactics here at home, I am very worried that political support will crumble not among Democrats, but among Republicans.(Emphasis mine.)
It has been three years since ''The Incident,'' the term the Dixie Chicks use when discussing the anti-Bush remark lead singer Natalie Maines uttered onstage in London and its fallout: detailed death threats, vandalism, a boycott by country radio, mass gatherings to destroy the group's CDs, the Red Cross' refusal of their $1 million donation.
It was all due to one line said in frustration days before America went to war in Iraq: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.''
(SFGate) - A substance found in fish oil may be associated with a significantly reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's and other dementias, researchers reported Monday.
"Every member of the Supreme Court received a wonderful package of home-baked cookies, and I don't know why, (but) the staff decided to analyze them," the Fort Worth Star-Telegram quoted O'Connor as saying at the legal conference November 10 in the Dallas area. "Each one contained enough poison to kill the entire membership of the court."(Emphasis mine.)
The letters did not seem to pose much of a real danger since the threatening note told the recipients the food was poisoned. In court papers submitted with the plea agreement, prosecutors said each of the envelopes contained a one-page typewritten letter stating either "I am" or "We are" followed by "going to kill you. This is poisoned."
Nov. 27, 2006 issue - To those who worried our violent, sex-obsessed, celebrity-crazed culture had at last reached the very farthest depths of depravity, O. J. Simpson and Judith Regan come bearing news: we had so much farther to fall. The accused but unconvicted killer and the attention-hungry pulp publisher have teamed up to create a product so lacking in taste and decency that people are already lining up to buy it.
In the book, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives -- from church attendance and two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services -- make conservatives more generous than liberals.--From a guy named Matt Margolis at a place called "Blogs for Bush," which styles itself as "The White House of the Blogosphere."
(WASHINGTON POST) - [Kenneth] Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."
