Words to strike terror into the stoutest heart. Enjoy!
It's not all caviar and baby wipes, mate
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Fargo Street
There’s an annual bike ‘race’ in LA each year, riding up the area’s steepest street. Here’s a page recounting the 2007 event. The idea is to get up the hill as many times as you can in a day, with records pushing 100. I can’t imagine the coast back down is that much fun, given how steep it is. The reason I’m posting this is because of this picture:
Checkout the front chainring on that thing. I doubt I could stay upright on that – it would be hard work to keep up with someone walking alongside you without your legs disappearing in a blur.
Hello
Having collected my boy from his new school a few times over the last fortnight, and overheard the conversations of various young mums, I offer the following language advice. “Hello” is pronounced with a short ‘o’, not a long ‘ooo’, and should at no point be pronounced in a sing-song tone. The Welsh can manage that, you can too.
BlogRush
Determined not to miss out on the next MyFaceKut*, I’ve signed up for BlogRush, which as far as I can tell is a pyramid scheme for advertising your blog. It’s biggest failing as a pyramid scheme is that it’s free, but as that’s not a failing I have to pay for I’m giving it a whirl. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you can see what all the fuss is about. OK, so there isn’t any fuss yet, but when there is you’ll be forewarned, which is as good as being forearmed. Though I don’t suppose you’ll need to bare arms against a site syndication widget.
*You haven’t heard of it? It’s a chat forum for emos and goths.
Wherein I make like a proper lefty blogger
The NYT is reporting that Michael B. Mukasey is likely to be the President’s next nominee for Attorney General. I know nothing about this man, but he sounds like a reasonable candidate:
Unlike Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Mukasey is not a close confidant of the president. Nor is he a Washington insider. But people in both political parties say he possesses the two qualities that Mr. Bush has been looking for in a nominee: a law-and-order sensibility that dovetails with the president’s agenda for the fight against terror, and the potential to avoid a bruising confirmation battle with the Democrats who now run the Senate.
The problem with the report is the next paragraph:
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who led the fight to oust Mr. Gonzales, issued a statement on Sunday evening praising Mr. Mukasey — a suggestion that Democrats, who are already challenging Mr. Bush over the war in Iraq, have little appetite for another big fight.
Well that might be true. but to me it suggests rather more strongly that Mr Musakey is OK. Yes, he’s a conservative, and the fact that Mr Bush approves of him automatically counts against him for me, but both of those are inevitable. The law, however we might wish it so, isn’t black and white, and where there is interpretation to be done a President will want it to be done according to his philosophy. It looks to me like the Democrats are saying “He’s a reasonable, principled kind of guy, so subject to some questioning he’s fine by us”. That’s what’s supposed to happen; not needing to fight isn’t the same as not wanting a fight.