Fapo

After using Facebook for year as a poor man's blog, I decided to bite the bullet and start posting again.

File this under the "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows" department. It looks like the Saudi's have given a green flag for Israel to use their airspace to go after Iran's nukes. The Saudi's are always triangulating, but what is real news is that they are going public with support of Jews over a Muslim state. (Courtesy of an old blogging friend, Mary Madigan).

Not that this has anything remotely to do with sour grapes, but Celtics fans can take heart that their "Beat LA" chant came true, even if LA had to resort to doing it themselves.

Who knew?

So explain to me again why the WoT is an issue of law enforcement?

Jules Crittenden writes a great article about the relevance of Waterloo.

Before there was the Internet, before there was cable, we and virtually all our friends would gather around the television and watch this, which should explain a lot to you kids. Doesn't it?

Rule number one. Always use the right tool for doing the right job.

Where is the caterwauling Sean Penn and Brian Williams now?

Courtesy of Shorpy's.

There is a great article about the cognitive dissonance that occurs when someone like Alyaan Hirsi Ali speaks to the sheltered elites at Santa Monica and dispels the notion that the danger of radical Islam is something that can be wished or voted away.

Well, she was black, so they could not dismiss her as a racist; she had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands and the United States, so they could not call her an ignorant provincial hick; she was an avowed atheist, so they could not call her a Christian bigot on a crusade against peaceful Islam; and she was multi-lingual, articulate, and brilliant, so they couldn’t just call her stupid. All the pejoratives they usually apply to people who disagree with them wouldn’t work, and so they were left to confront her ideas, and those ideas stripped them naked, rent their garments of superiority and condescension into tatters at their feet, and left them angry and confused, whining to each other in the corners of the room, unable to say anything to her face. Their favorite weapons, ad hominem name-calling and sneering condescension, were disarmed.

She continues to be a very brave woman.

Either the explicit abdication of responsibility by the Federal government or the failure to take responsibility has led to a re-awakening of the role of state governments to take charge of their future.

In Arizona:

In Louisiana :

In New Jersey:

The origins of "Airplane".

And don't call me Shirley. Courtesy of Ace.

All families have their quirks and idiosyncrasies. One that struck me a few days ago was when my eldest daughter Julianne posted a Facebook message.

“Happy Father’s Day Podge”

I’m Podge.

Don’t ask me how or when I got this name, but our family seems to generate new ones on the fly without rhyme or reason. We tend to use them for a while to see if they stick or, better yet, annoy.

I suspect Podge was derived from Padre, which Jules (i.e. Julianne) adopted sometime around seventh or eighth grade when she first took Spanish. Jules is an obvious derivation, but she also is known as JayBaby, and Hullibeans. The latter was probably another Spanish twist where a “J” in Spanish is pronounced as an English “H”. So Julianne became Julie, which morphed into Hulli. Where the “beans” suffix came from I haven’t a clue.

After a while these mutations become too complex to track.

Alison became Adie (courtesy of Julianne when she was two years old and could not quite articulate Alison.) That stuck for a good ten years. I personally nicknamed her “Weed” which she disdains. This was due to my personal bemusement that she seemed to have a propensity for crawling and popping up underfoot in places that she shouldn't have been. I suspect I’m not the only father that does such stuff. James Lileks has written for years about his daughter “Gnat” (a pet name for Natalie). Alison decided enough was enough and insisted that everyone call her Ali, which I continue to misspell as Alie. Some friends call her “Girnis” which is her Lithuanian family middle name.

That strikes me as enormously ironic since it has taken me fifty-seven years to successfully ditch my middle name. As a child I was saddled with my middle English family name “Champney”, to disambiguate myself from my paternal grandfather, “Bob”, and my uncle “Bobby” who was killed in the South Pacific in World War II. At the time we were living with grandparents under the same household, and the name "Bobby" was understandably painful to hear.

Needless to say when we moved into an Irish Catholic town when I was eleven years old, my British upper crust moniker was something others had difficulty warming up to. By any measure “Champney” sounded elitist and by comparison makes names such as “Hollingsworth” sound Bubba grade pedestrian. The name did not make life particularly easy in the sixth grade.

“Say lovey, where’s Master Champney today?"

"Oh I suspect he's out and about yachting with T. Coddington again.".

Off to college and adulthood, I resurrected Robert, and Rob, and Robby, and Bob, and Bobby. I was happy with anything as long as I didn't have to repeat it ten times and explain or defend its origins. I might try Bert someday, just to be perverse. My girls would no doubt instantly recast me as Ernie. All these variants have had some utility. When I get a phone call, if someone asks for "Champ", I know it's an old friend or someone in the family. If someone uses "Bob" its an adult friendship or someone at work. If its "Robert" its definitely a telemarketer and I hang up immediately.

Yet the middle name still haunts me. A few weeks ago I was told that I might be terminated because Homeland Security couldn’t verify my identity with the Social Security Administration. Large companies are being asked to verify citizenship of employees, not a bad idea unless the i’s are not dotted or the t’s not crossed. The failure to verify was because my mother used my middle name when she signed us up for our Social Security numbers, so the name on my passport did not align with the name in SSA. Somehow the IRS and SSA seemed to figure all this stuff out when it came to tracking my income and collecting money. But when it comes to figuring out whether or not I'm a U.S. citizen, things broke down.

Pet names are in a league of their own. Lucy our Aussie morphed into “Loosey Goosey” which morphed into “Goose” which then morphed into “Goofer”. Titan morphed into “T” and for a while lived a life as “Frank”. Our tabby, “Sunny” morphed into “SunBall” then “Ball” and then into “Prince” and “Prince Bee”.

And we wonder why the pets don’t come when we call them by name.

You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.

We are on the fast track to third world status.

For the next half-hour, Walmart is dropping prices on babies to twenty five dollars. Hurry while supplies last.

Every time Paul McCartney opens his mouth publicly, it conjures images like this:

There is something unnerving and deeply embarrassing when you realize that someone you admired in your youth has stayed frozen in time and is stuck with the maturity and intellectual grasp of a not so bright twenty year old. In 1964 his musing were naive and innocent. In 2010 such musings sound disturbing.

Anyone who associates global ("Hide the decline") warming with the Holocaust is a real Nowhere Man.

Thankfully the Sun readers in London really give it to Sir Paul:

I guess it's true, Paul was replaced by a wax dummy from Madame Tussauds.

Or better yet:

Shut up and sing.

A door swings both ways. Imposing overly restrictive rules of engagement saves civilian casualties from activities of coalition forces, but allows the Taliban to kill civilians with impunity.

As bad as things are in Afghanistan, the fact that Afghans are starting to get angry at troops about their rules of engagement which prevent them from killing Taliban where civilian casualties are at risk, might be a good sign.

The key to success in Iraq was winning the hearts and minds of those living in the western provinces of Anbar, After years of abuse by ruling Al Qaeda thugs, the citizens finally supported the U.S. troops.

File this under "America always can be counted on to the right thing, after all other solutions have failed."

Along with the failure of the Federal government to address illegal immigration, and the failure coordinate agencies to deal with the Gulf disaster, widespread recognition of the dysfunction of public education is start to get traction in a variety of interesting venues.

The "boys" at Hillbuzz discuss.

This week's inside-the-beltway brouhaha seems to involve the firing of David Weigel.

If you said "David who?" you are like me, too focused on going to work and paying my bills to get bothered about some leaked emails from Journolist, some liberal reporter electronic bitch forum used by the D.C. crowd.

Weigel's mia culpa leaves the reader with two obvious and unanswered questions:

Who cares about the preening of D.C. pack journalists anyway?

Why such deep existential angst about the "difficult" choices that confront journalists?

Here's a simple suggestion. Why not just go out and report the facts comprehensively and as objectively as possible and leave it to the readers to form their own opinions? Sounds crazy but it might keep you from standing in the unemployment line and having to listen war stories about the good ole days at "Newsweek".

Typically, coloration of black and white photographs never work, but Shorpy's seems to have a knack of knowing the exceptions as well as the rules.

Another day, another Marie Antoinette moment...

Andrew Breitbart is offering one hundred thousand dollars for the archive of Journolist, and Iowahawk responds.

Courtesy of one of my UVA buddies.

The Tea Party has political traction primarily because it doesn't trust the Republican Party.