Heh. And I was just looking for a good version of this song (this live version isn’t, quite).
PS: One free bardic tip. When you do an introduction or preface to a performance piece, take whatever time you’ve allotted to the introduction/preface and cut it in half.
…but I can’t help but notice that if I were trying to get out of a potentially disastrous PR meltdown (9/11 victims’ families versus “human rights groups”) while not immediately infuriating my base over Gitmo detainees I would start by getting a 120 day delay-of-game, too. After all, we could be very easily worrying about more important things by May.
No, seriously, think about it: why does he need four months for review? Didn’t he already have a couple of years to come up with a plan?
(Via AoSHQ.)
…we actually had a spare.
We just assumed that you weren’t up for Jeb having his turn. But apparently this was a bad assumption on our part (original alert via MsUnderestimated):
…
Our bad, I guess.
Moe Lane
PS: How are your new unicorns settling in?
That’s quite a lot, really. Maybe not quite record-breaking, but still quite a lot:
A record crowd for inauguration? Hard to say
Reporting from Washington — More than 1 million spectators convened on the National Mall to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office Tuesday, but it was unclear if the crowd surpassed the record thought to have been set at Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 inauguration.
Though early estimates ranged as high as 2 million people, satellite images of Obama’s swearing-in suggested the crowd was probably about half that, said Clark McPhail, who has been analyzing crowds on the National Mall since the 1960s.
Not the three million or so that the consensus had come up with, but… passable. Very passable. Besides, tons of people watched it on television or online, no doubt.
After all, you wouldn’t actually have to do anything to see it that way.
Moe Lane
PS: How did Bush do? Bless your heart, if I didn’t care then, why should I care now? I’m sure that he had less than Obama did, if that’s what’s worrying you.
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
From Neal Stephenson
Anyway. Universal truth, there – at least, it’s resonated with every guy I’ve ever shown it to – but there’s not really much you can do with the information, is there? Except wait for individual males to get past being 25, I suppose.
(Today’s guy: Charles Stross
If you’re the sort of person who thinks that mixing higher mathematics, spy fiction, and the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of cool… well, you’ve probably already read The Atrocity Archives
CBS itself put them up there, in full, and in high-definition: you can’t embed them, and there are ads, but from what I can tell these are the originals, not the hacked-up syndication versions, so good deal all around.
Here’s Mirror, Mirror, which I looked up mostly because my wife and I were trying to remember whether Star Trek: TOS
Remember this event, the next time a Democrat holds out his hand to you.
[Update: Video added, and the Hill’s Blog Briefing Room is back up, so I’m cutting back the article.]
…and, given the general meltdown of the Internet, it’s currently down. Via comments here:
January 20, 2009
Bush Mocked As He Arrives on Inauguration Dais
@ 11:52 am by Hill Staff
Well, that didn’t take long:
Kicking a man once he’s safely out of power and can’t kick back doesn’t diminish him; it merely diminishes you. But, hey: message received, Mr. President.
Message received.
Moe Lane
Eh. Just words, apparently.
I won’t spoil it by excerpting.
Heh. I don’t need to bother with politics for a while today, in fact.
