eggshellsundae

The US military has mistakenly killed 17 civilians, including women and children, as part of the botched operation to recover four missing servicemen in Afghanistan last week, according to a provincial governor.

posted by Shannon  # 11:38:00 AM 24 comments

I didn’t want to see it, but I nodded anyway. I had come precisely to see it, to witness Hannah’s disfigurement, the fruit of a long series of medical miscalculations. It had begun in the 1980s with two kinds of hepatitis, B and C, a condition that prison doctors had largely ignored for a decade, then treated with a series of botched, questionable procedures that caused David’s cells to cease performing osmosis properly, so that over time his natural body fluids began to collect, trapped inside his gut with no way to evacuate, his midsection swelling to accommodate those fluids, expanding to such a size and weight that the mere act of walking around had given David, by December 2000, a pair of hernias, neither of which the prison doctors had bothered to treat. David stood now to show me the belly and the hernias, the condition his body had arrived at through an utter lack of attention. He pulled his flannel shirt to the side of his waist and lifted his gray T-shirt, and, in spite of myself, I winced. His belly was enormous, taut and pasty, seemingly glued to his gaunt frame. At the front of it, a hot-pink hernia, about the size of a grapefruit, seemed barely attached where the belly button should have been, giving David’s midsection the overall contour of a giant breast and nipple. Bracing myself, I asked him where the other hernia had emerged. He studied me, obviously not fond of baring his physique. After a moment, he shrugged and unbuttoned his pants.

To describe David’s scrotum as swollen and red would be a failure of language. It was about the size of a rugby ball, so raw and irritated, shiny and crimson, that it almost seemed to be covered with blood. David hung his head. 'They give me aspirin,' he said.

Later, when I heard that David had died of indeterminate causes and that his body had been cremated, I realized that I had probably been the last person outside of the prison staff to see David alive, to see what his body had become from all those years of mistreatment, and I wondered: Can such a secret be kept?

posted by Shannon  # 7:26:00 PM 0 comments

Francine Keyes, age 11, went missing from a camping trip with family friends on June 12 in Big Bend National Park. Thousands of law enforcement officers and volunteers spent days combing the park and surrounding regions. The girl was located unharmed on Friday June 17 in the company of an unemployed drifter named Gregory Stokes, who has been arrested and charged with aggravated kidnapping. The initial euphoria of the find, however, was soon offset when the first television footage of the rescue hit the airwaves.

"At first I thought the kidnapper had dyed her hair, you know, to make her less easy to recognize," said Maria Baker, one of the volunteers who spent 50 hours last week searching. "Then I thought, wow, that week in the wilderness sure was rough on her. Then I saw a closeup, and I thought, man, did a bear get her too?"

It turns out that Francine's family had doctored the photo released to police and the media in order to make her "more appealing" and spur a wider rescue effort. In the picture, she is a perky, cute blonde girl somewhat resembling Lindsay Lohan.

"In actuality, Francine is neither perky nor blonde," said a grim-faced Perry. "In fact, her picture is mainly a testament to her father's skills with Photoshop."

Media networks are squirming, faced with the fact they cannot avoid airing pictures of the girl after the intensive media coverage of the search all last week.

"This is supposed to be the windfall time; the triumphant return of a photogenic kidnapping victim plays great with the 18-35 viewing audience, and can boost advertising revenues for months with follow-up stories on her return to normal life," said Stacy Umbridge, a producer at CNN. "For crying out loud. The girl's got a gap between her front teeth big enough to drive a car through."

posted by Shannon  # 3:49:00 AM 2 comments

Angered by the Extreme Court's new ruling that cities can serve as the paid middleman for land grabs for shopping centers (or for even more useful new baseball stadiums), some libertarians have told me this proves we don't have a conservative high court after all. They misunderstand. Conservatism is not about using government power to protect the alleged property rights of individual land owners; it is about using that power to funnel profits to private companies.

The Constitution was not written by Thomas Paine, or Patrick Henry, or even a temporizer like Thomas Jefferson. It was drafted by pro-business trimmers like that monopoly banker Alexander Hamilton, and enabling trimmers like James Madison -- who should be thought of as the economic Joe Biden of the Convention. Yes, the state at all levels can funnel profits to entrepreneurs.

We never needed a Constitution to fight off the British. All that rhetoric about 'free markets' is only a campaign slogan. Or to put it bluntly, what we are really trying to conserve isn't your home, it's our profits. You got a problem with that, then you're un-American and pro-terrorist. When it comes to the basic law of the land, the court has now quite properly told the little people just what Dr. Frank-n-furter told Janet about Rocky Horror: 'We didn't make it for you.'

posted by Shannon  # 11:20:00 PM 0 comments

Bea Arthur?

Just pack him in the front seat of a Mini then crash it into a tree.

Asteroid. Big one. Does the trick every time.

posted by Shannon  # 7:43:00 PM 0 comments

Peasant farmer Daniel M'Mburugu was tending to his potato and bean crops in a rural area near Mount Kenya when the leopard charged out of the long grass and leapt on him.

M'Mburugu had a machete in one hand but dropped that to thrust his fist down the leopard's mouth. He gradually managed to pull out the animal's tongue, leaving it in its death-throes.

'It let out a blood-curdling snarl that made the birds stop chirping,' he told the daily Standard newspaper of how the leopard came at him and knocked him over.

The leopard sank its teeth into the farmer's wrist and mauled him with its claws. 'A voice, which must have come from God, whispered to me to drop the panga (machete) and thrust my hand in its wide open mouth. I obeyed,' M'Mburugu said.

As the leopard was dying, a neighbour heard the screams* and arrived to finish it off with a machete.

posted by Shannon  # 7:23:00 PM 0 comments

Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and 'anti-administration' was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.

'It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president,' Senator Dorgan said. 'It's unbelievable.'

Not from this gang. Mr. Mann was hardly chosen by chance to assemble what smells like the rough draft of a blacklist. He long worked for a right-wing outfit called the National Journalism Center, whose director, M. Stanton Evans, is writing his own Ann Coulteresque book to ameliorate the reputation of Joe McCarthy. What we don't know is whether the 50 pages handed over to Senator Dorgan is all there is to it, or how many other 'monitors' may be out there compiling potential blacklists or Nixonian enemies lists on the taxpayers' dime.

posted by Shannon  # 5:03:00 PM 0 comments

Hollywood and the music industry can file piracy lawsuits against technology companies caught encouraging customers to steal music and movies over the Internet, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

posted by Shannon  # 4:33:00 PM 1 comments

Assignment to the women's dormitory in college.

Toughened up by regular beatings as a child.

Thanks to registration fraud, coed softball team is stacked.

Actually getting selected off the backstage list to meet the band.

Direct-mail marketing from lingerie companies.

Nobody suspects you're the jerk parked in the handicapped spot when name is announced over the supermarket P.A.

Weaseling out of the Selective Service.

Scoring an interview down at Legs Legs Legs strip club.

Oratorical skills improved by daily speech explaining how, in Ireland, there are lots of men named Kelly.

posted by Shannon  # 6:56:00 PM 0 comments