No disassemble!

Herewith an excerpt of the transcript from today's Presidential press conference, held only a few hundred feet from my very office:

"THE PRESIDENT: I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that is—promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way. It's just an absurd allegation.

In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of—and the allegations—by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble—that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is."

Now, we all know that George isn't exactly the wordsmith he fancies himself. I'm tempted to take him to task about his use of the word "absurd," but any thinking person knows he's just trying to put up a smokescreen re the Amnesty report. What do those Commie tree-huggers know anyway? Did they expect him to actually 'fess up to approving water boarding and renditions? Please. The real issue here is his use of the word "disassemble." The word is "DISSEMBLE," you moron. If you're going to call additional attention to the word by defining it, at least have one of your little minion/handler-types school you on the correct pronunciation. Or would he say pronounciation? This kind of stuff just makes me think of Jon Lovitz as Dukakis on a late-80s SNL after squaring off in a debate against a less-than-articulate Bush 41:


"I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

NB—"[W]e've investigated every single complaint against the detainees"? Huh? Since when were the complaints against the detainees? I thought the complaints were against the government. Shows you how much I know...

They creep me out...

...and I'm not quite sure exactly why.

I should not be hearing diurnal birds chirping at ten minutes after midnight. They should be sleeping, constricting their creepy little bird feet around a branch. It's just so very, very wrong...

Strong contender for a U.K. Darwin Award

Call me uncharitable, but I think that when you fill a fluorescent light bulb with gasoline to use it as a light saber, you may qualify for removal from the gene pool...

That Book Meme...

...originally found at Chaodai's site, but I saw it at Merujo's. Just want to give credit where it's due.

1) Total number of books owned?

This is tough, but I'll just say that it's over 500. Lots on the U.S. Civil War, World War II, graphic design, typography, capital punishment (don't ask), and scifi.

2) The last book I bought?

Bought simultaneously: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.

3) The last book I read?

Thomas B. Buell's The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War

4) Five books that mean a lot to me

I'll list them, but I'm going to keep their reasons for being special to myself.

• Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl


• The Book of Lists #3 by Amy Wallechinsky Wallace, David Irving, and Wallace Irving


• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl


• "Cherry Ripe" in The Phantom Cyclist and Other Ghost Stories by Ruth Ainsworth


• To be determined

5) Bonus recommendation

I would recommend Stephen King's entire Dark Tower series. Start at the beginning. Merujo's heard me blathering on and on about it for quite some time. She's reading the series now—I believe I've gotten her hooked. I'm a bad man. Gunslingers, to me!

Was I right, or was I right?

When I say the pilot missed the briefing, he indeed did just that, according to MSNBC:

The pilot who caused a midday panic in Washington on Wednesday failed to get briefings about the weather and restricted airspace and became lost minutes after leaving a Pennsylvania airport, Federal Aviation Administration records show.

It's the little things that make life worthwhile...

Bad IP. Bad IP.

I work near the White House. Normally this is not such a big deal, but around noon it became one.

In case you haven't heard, the White House and Capitol Building were evacuated today. Fighter jets were scrambled while Uncle Dick was spirited off to a not-so-remote and presumably not-very-secret location. (Considering his motorcade returned to the WH after about 20 minutes, he couldn't have gone all that far.) Of course, my colleagues and I were scrambling to find out just what was going on, but all we found was "White House on alert; staff evacuated." Not the most comforting headlines in any event, but especially disconcerting when you're sitting about 500m from 1600 Penn with F-16s overhead.

After about fifteen minutes of dithering and wondering whether we were going to die before lunch, we heard the all clear sound. A few hours later we found out that it was a student pilot and his apparently inept instructor pilot in a Cessna 150 on their way to an air show in North Carolina. They're based at an airport just outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You'd think that it would be fairly common knowledge in the pilot community not to fly all that close to the White House. Apparently the IP missed that briefing.

The other part that I found a bit disconcerting about the whole incident is that the President wasn't even working at the time (around 12:30 EDT). He was "taking a bike ride with a security detail near Waldorf, Maryland," according to CNN.com. We know his day usually consists of getting up pretty early and hitting the gym before he has his newspapers read to him, so why the mid-day bike ride? Could it be because his workload really isn't all that much these days, considering that the whole Iraq thing is pretty much "lather, rinse, repeat" for him? Maybe he was trying to recover from the trip to Europe to honor the veterans and fallen of WWII. I'd like to think that given his adventures in Texas and (maybe) Alabama in the early 1970s, he felt somewhat ashamed and abashed in the face of all of those who had actually served and sacrificed for their country. But he probably didn't.

Possible band names

• Pubic Toupée


• Angry Yak


• Eyeball Papercuts (my favorite, actually)

There was one other name that Merujo suggested, but I couldn't bring myself to include it. Let's just say that I am not good with things scatological.