Medary.com

OK, here we go.  I got this (cut/pasted in its entirety) in my e-mail today:

Subject: RE: Dinky Pottychunks


MY NEW NAME IS IN THE SUBJECT.....DON'T LAUGH UNTIL YOU FIND OUT WHAT YOUR
NEW NAME IS!! 

We all need a little stress-reliever! This only takes a minute.

Please don't be a bore & ruin it. Send it on to everyone you know including
the person that sent it to you.

Sometimes when you have a stressful day or week, you need some silliness to
break up the day. If we are honest, we have a lot more stressful days than
not.

Here is your dose of humor... 

A. Follow the instructions to find your new 
name.

B. Once you have your new name, put it in the 
subject box and forward it to friends and 
family & co-workers.

Don't for get to forward it back to the person who sent it to you 
so they know you participated. 

And don't go all adult - a senior manager is now known far & wide as Dorky
Gizzardsniffer!

The following is excerpted from a children's book, Captain Underpants And
the Perilous Plot Professor Poopypants, by Dave Pilkey, in which the evil
Professor forces everyone to assume new names... 

So:-

1. Use the third letter of your first name to 
determine your New first name:

a = snickle
b = doombah 
c = goober
d = cheesey
e = crusty
f = greasy
g = dumbo
h = farcus
i = dorky
j = doofus
k = funky
l = boobie
m = sleezy
n = sloopy
o = fluffy 
p = stinky
q = slimy
r = dorfus
s = snooty
t = tootsie
u = dipsy
v = sneezy
w = liver
x = skippy
y = dinky
z = zippy

2. Use the second letter of your middle name to determine the first half of
your new last name: 

a = dippin
b = feather
c = batty
d = burger
e = chicken
f = barffy
g = lizard
h = waffle
i = farkle
j = monkey
k = flippin
l = fricken
m = bubble
n = rhino
o = potty
p = hamster 
q = buckle
r = gizzard
s = lickin
t = snickle
u = chuckle
v = pickle
w = hubble
x = dingle
y = gorilla 
z = girdle

3. Use the third letter of your last name to determine the second half of
your new last name: 

a = butt
b = boob
c = face
d = nose
e = hump
f = breath
g = pants
h = shorts
i = lips
j = honker
k = head
l = tush
m = chunks
n = dunkin
o = brains
p = biscuits
q = toes
r = doodle 
s = fanny
t = sniffer
u = sprinkles
v = frack
w = squirt
x = humperdinck
y = hiney
z = juice

Thus, for example, George W. Bush's new name is: Fluffy Chucklefanny.

Now when you SEND THIS ON...use your new name as the subject. 

And remember that children laugh an average of 146 times a day; adults laugh
an average of 4 times a day.
 

You know, I don't think I am under sufficient stress to warrant something like Dorky Gizzardfanny . . .

My lovely wife Snookums is, of course, Sloopy Dippinchunks, which my eyes insist on reading as Sloppy Dippinchunks . . .

Oh, and for future reference, George W. (Walker) Bush is Fluffy Dippinfanny, not Fluffy Chucklefanny (Unless, of course, you think his middle name is "Dubya").

Iowahawk hosts some Iowa Caucuses.  (Warning.  This account may not be completely, totally accurate in all respects.  Sorry for the language, too, by the way.)  An excerpt:

7:31 PM: Jesus, what a disaster. The Huckabee people are speaking in tongues and accusing the Romney people of believing in dinosaurs. The McCain people have invited the network news people for their caucus in the garage, and that *censored*ing Tim Russert has his lighting man standing on the hood of (Iowahawk Wife )Tammy's Civic. I open up the garage door and shut off the garage power at the fuse box, figuring they'll get cold and go away.

7:42 PM: As if things couldn't get any worse, now the Democrats are coming upstairs to use the hall toilet because of the problem in the basement. The environmentalists only use one square of paper, and the others steal entire rolls. None of them wash their hands. I'm headed out on the deck to smoke another doob with the Thompson people, who seem to be the only sane ones here.

I've got a good idea that's how this entire election year is gonna go . . . our country is in fact Doomed.  I think I'm gonna switch from Thompson to Obama.  That way I can turn my brain completely off, too.

Captain's Quarters:

Some CapQ readers have pointed to the latest numbers from Zogby in Iowa as a harbinger of a Fred Thompson surprise for tomorrow's caucuses. In their daily tracking poll, conducted by traditional telephone surveys rather than on-line polls, Zogby shows a significant bump in support over the last three days -- enough to tie Fred with John McCain for third place:

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, gained a bit on Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. Huckabee cumulative three-day tracking total equaled 28% support among likely Republican caucus–goers, while Romney moved up from 25% to 26% support. Arizona Sen. John McCain remained in third place at 12%, tied with former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who has seen a late-breaking surge. Among Democrats, 5% were yet undecided just three days ahead of the caucuses. Among Republicans, 6% were yet unsure.

Huckabee’s support spans all age groups, but he is particularly strong among voters under age 30.

. . .
And the biggest shame of that is that Thompson could still be the unity candidate. Given his track record on federalism, Thompson offered the complete conservative package -- smaller government, lower taxes and spending, pro-life, hard as nails on terrorism and only slightly less so on immigration, and the ability to charge life into the Reagan alliance that supports these ideals. He has been remarkably consistent, and the only real detriment would be his lack of executive experience and his inability to put together a real campaign.

Of all of the people running for President, the only one I think I'd be truly comfortable with, knowing what I know about all of them right now, is Thompson.  He seems to be running on the platform of "the only person who should be President is someone who doesn't really want the job."  That in and of itself is enough to get my vote, for now.  Of course, I'm not in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or South Carolina, or any of the early caucus/primary states, so I might not get the chance.

Our political process is well and truly f**ked up.

From Bill Whittle, at Eject! Eject! Eject!

We’ve spent a lot of time with John Boyd, because I and others believe his theories not only won the war, but if properly applied they might do the nearly impossible and win the peace as well.

If I understand this enigmatic and complex man correctly, he came to the conclusion that there was something beyond the Perfect Sword; something beyond even the Perfect Swordsman. Because as Sun Tzu pointed out, there is a level of warrior satori beyond even that. Beyond them both lay Swordlessness.

Swordlessness is not peace and it is certainly not surrender. Swordlessness uses nothing but the enemy’s sword against him. Perfect Swordlessness is a sublime victory so complete that there is no fight at all. It is over before it begins.

General Petraeus – just perhaps – is in the process of winning such a victory in Iraq. By brilliant diplomacy, deep understanding of the culture and the judicious use of gunpowder and money, it appears he has severed most of the Sunni tribes from al Qaeda and used them as “Awakening” peacekeeping militias against their former allies. General Petraeus is not fighting the last war; he is fighting the next one. He did not arrive there and just hope for the best. He observed. He oriented. He decided. And he acted. And then he observed again to see what effect he had. And again. And again.

This is not firepower. This is not attrition. This is, rather, an intelligent, delicate, sophisticated, maneuver-based strategy. A light, but sometimes deadly touch. Fingertip control. Water flowing downhill, into the cracks which our enemy cannot fill.

And while you can criticize the President for not taking a relatively unknown, low-ranking general and giving him the whole ball of wax sooner, you might also note that Gen. Creighton Abrams' radical change of strategy in Vietnam was implemented only after it was well and truly too late.

If this continues, Gen. Petraeus will have walked into the camp of the enemy and used his own sword against him. That is a profound species of victory.

God willing, the REAL "first draft of history."

Michael Totten, from Fallujah:

It has been months since the jihadists have been able to murder anyone in Fallujah. Only a few weeks before, however, a handful showed up on a street corner and handed out anti-American snuff films on DVD. Apparently they thought the local civilians would be impressed. They were not. They called the Iraqi Police, and the propagandists were taken away to the jail.

The main Jolan market was up ahead, but first we passed through a neighborhood that, unlike almost anywhere else in Iraq, received 24 hours a day of electricity.

Lieutenant Barefoot pointed up toward the sky. “See the electricity poles?” he said. I did, and I was amazed.

The neighborhood was wired properly as though it were part of a modern First World country. Gone all of a sudden were the hideously tangled rat's nest of wires and cables that make up most of Iraq's electrical grid.

In fact, electrical wire rat's nests are common in "Third World" countries, even ones much less troubled than Iraq.

Go and read Totten's full article at michaeltotton.com (there's pictures there, too).

Peaceful Venezuela, lead by the beloved Maximum Leader and dear friend of Cindy Sheehan, Hugo Chavez:  12,249 murders.
(Now, we don't know how many more people were otherwise offed or "disappeared" by the Chavez regime, do we?)

War-torn Iraq, scene of a hopeless civil war and a quagmire from which the only solution is a hasty American retreat:  19,408 (combination of Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi civilian deaths)

As Gateway Pundit notes, the populations of Iraq and Venezuela are almost identical.  He further notes that most of the Iraqi casualties happened in the first part of 2007, before the "Surge" counterinsurgency strategy had taken full effect.

Kinda gives a bit of perspective, doesn't it?

In the New York Times, no less:

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

"Climate Change" increasingly has very little to do with the honest scientific study of Earth's climate (which, of course, has been changing constantly since the Earth accreted from the primordial stuff in the early millenia of the Solar System).  Climatism, the worship of the Earth's Climate (As It Exists Today Right Now, Forever And Unchanging) a strange melange of power-seeking, money-grubbing hucksterism, feel-goodism, and ashes-and-sackcloth self-loathing and hatred for the species homo sapiens, all bundled up into one pseudo-religious straw man which was once called "Global Warming" before that became a bit too specific for the new Climatist priesthood, lead by St. Albert of Gore.  Their main tactic is in ginning up a sense of impending doom, a tactic which has largely been as successful as it has been disingenuous.

"Climate Change" isn't about science.  It's about creating a new religion out of whole cloth.  If you believe in "Climate Change" you will be saved.  If you don't, you're a "denier" and will be cast out of Heaven.  Everything bad is caused by Global Warming.  Everything good is Green.  For the children.  And the polar bears.  Or something like that.

There is no god but Gaia, and Al Gore is her prophet.  Peace and carbon credit-derived profits (that's profit, not prophet) be upon him.

Meanwhile, we still have much to learn and debate about how the climate works, how much of the warming we've seen is because of increased solar activity rather than increased CO2, whether or not CO2 level is a leading or a trailing indicator of warming, if warming is due to the growth of urban areas and/or socioeconomic factors, or if warming has leveled off since the late 1990's.  There is so much we do not know.  (We do, for instance, know that most of the "experts" of the UN's IPCC panel which is leading the climatist crusade with St. Gore were not experts in atmospheric sciences or climatology, however.)  But that doesn't stop the Congress from banning almost all incandescent light bulbs, starting in 2012.

Less religion, more science, please.

A partial list of Things I Do Not Believe:

Global warming/climate change being primarily driven by human influence
The USDA Food Pyramid as a guide to healthy nutrition
Intelligent Design as a scientific theory
String "Theory" as a scientific theory
The Iraq War was a Bad Thing
Government Bailouts help anybody at all in the long run except politicians
You (singularly or collectively) know better than me how I should spend my money.

Having completely recovered from my India Pale Ale experience the other night, I ready a glass of the third in the Smokestack Series of ales from Kansas City's Boulevard Brewing Company.

The Long Strange Tripel ale is lighter in color, and in flavor than either of the previous two entries in the Smokestack Series that I've sampled.  It is of course a more full-bodied beer than the mass market Bud/Miller/Coors stuff, and probably a bit more full than Boulevard's Wheat beer.  It is not bitter at all (danke Gott) and I deem it most agreeable.

Now, all I need is a Jackrabbits win in men's basketball vs. San Jose State tonight, and the evening will be complete.

Yahoo News:

PASADENA, Calif. - There could be some discord during the Tournament of Roses Parade as demonstrators promise to raise issues during the holiday spectacle that has been going on for more than a century. Human rights advocates plan to protest a float honoring the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and anti-war activists, including "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan, intend to rally for peace.

What's the Matter with California?
Rampant, unrestrained narcissism, possibly?  The whole freakin' state is overrun with narcissists . . . the only reason why they don't rename California to Narcissistia is because it would be too damn hard to spell--worse even than Massachussetts.