HOLY FREAKING BATTLESHIP MISSOURI! By the time the shutter snapped, the ball was, in relation to this picture on your screen, about six monitors up and climbing. It was whistling. I lost track of it since I was trying to get the picture, but the guys say it cleared the treeline by probably another hundred yards.

Cool. I’d like one.

But this is good news. FDL wants this shit and they want it bad. I saw, a day or two ago, they tallied up something like — I think it was 214 yes 211 no, something like that.

So things are moving in the right direction. Question is, where do they go from here.

It’s the wrong bill at the wrong time.

It’s pretty easy to find some Yasmine swimsuit pics on the web, and dang hard to find any of Zooey. But Zooey takes it anyway. She’s not a cokehead, she’s got gorgeous eyes, seems (from what I can gather) to be a woman of class, and she’s got nice bangs.

Bangs. You know, as in hair.

Hey, Bryan Singer. You cast Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. Zooey was right there. She was right freakin’ there. Ms. Bosworth was alright…but to envision a 1980 Margot Kidder aging into Kate, was a little distracting. All in all it would have to go into the Mistake File. Shoulda gone with Zooey.

Yeah, I know that’s kind of late notice for ya. But it’s true.

No matter what your agenda is, you do not rise to that level of power by being an idiot.

It’s not Obama’s intelligence that I call into question. Rather, I question his priorities, his values, his judgement, his character, his friends, his advisors, his agenda….and yes, his patriotism.

But idiot? No.

Now to be clear, I did not call Obama an idiot and I would not call Obama an idiot. I made a cutesy reference to the 50% of the people writing Him letters, whom He Himself reports are calling Him an idiot. And that is almost certainly out of a sense of exasperation, not the culmination of a sincere effort to assess intellect or lack thereof.

I’m currently working my way through Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, so I’m keen on the idea that there are multiple ways to measure intelligence. Perhaps the most reliable way to measure intellect’s most fundamental layer is with raw resourcefulness — wriggling one’s way out of, or through, a tight spot. Both Clinton and Obama have demonstrated this in spades.

Getting tripped up by something, does nothing to refute this quality. We all make our little “oopsies.” Clinton had his Monica, Bush’s public-relations handling of Iraq was a disaster, and of course Obama has Afghanistan. Bush’s Dad had a “read my lips” moment. Reagan had Iran/Contra, and retreating from Lebanon. Pobody’s Nerfect.

But why do people screw up? If you investigate this, here and there you can, at least, find some limits. With the Iraq thing, my firm conclusion is that George Bush simply didn’t try. It’s a Bush family attribute. You have this thing called “political capital,” you never spend more than you have, but at the same time you spend all that you have because whatever doesn’t get spent is useless. Follow those two simple rules, put your faith in God, and everything will work out. This time, it didn’t work out. That doesn’t show George W. Bush is stupid, however; it shows he is stubborn.

Bill Clinton was not stupid because of Monica, I don’t think. He was impulsive and reckless. He demonstrates a lot of qualities common to addictive personalities. If he labors over part of a lifetime building something, and a sexual dalliance can wreck it, there’s a part of him that just doesn’t care. It’s as if the sex itself takes place in an entirely different universe from whatever it is he’s been building, and he doesn’t think about the damage until after it’s all done. By which time it’s too late of course. The man really needs psychiatric help, but he isn’t stupid.

On Afghanistan, I have some real troubles with Obama’s intellect. I’m convinced His I.Q. is well above the national average. But there’s a lot of functional intelligence He’s missing. It doesn’t hurt His efforts in any area in which He possesses some actual experience — but as we all realize now, some of us belatedly, there are many areas of life in which He does not possess adequate experience. He doesn’t have the common sense to run off and get help in these areas. His lack of humility will not allow for it, and His sense of judgment is not that sound.

Ultimately, my indictment against Obama’s intelligence is that when & if the moment comes along in which it’s demonstrated He doesn’t know something that He needs to know, He fails in the department of — curiosity. He is incurious. Is it fair to categorize curiosity as a kind of intellect? Perhaps not. But it ultimately has a weighty influence on what you know, over the long term. And it has a bearing on the outcome of what you are trying to do.

To be fair to President Obama, I suppose this is a long-standing curse upon that high office. It’s really tough to get there, and once you’ve made it there, it’s even tougher to keep in mind there might be some other people who know things you don’t know, that you need to go find out. Obama is not the first President with this problem, and He most assuredly will not be the last.

Would I trust someone like Him to do an important job for me? Yes…maybe…but only so important. Delivering my newspaper. I don’t think I’d let him in my house to fix something or haul something away. Not unless I was there to supervise. And spare me the comments and e-mails about race, please. I’ve spent an entire lifetime working in high-technology fields. I just don’t trust people who “know everything.” I’ve seen them break too many things, and have spent too many thankless hours fixing it after Mister Wonderful has moved on to break something else.

And this is what I’m seeing now. No, Obama is not an idiot. But He’s in “King Midas” mode — deep inside, I think He has this delusion that when Congress puts together some dangerous, ramshackle health care bill, it isn’t even going to matter what’s written in the bill. Holy Man will lay His hands upon it, and that will make it wonderful. So I would say, yes, He is very smart in some ways. But His hostility toward reality interferes with His ability to perceive reality, to learn things He needs to learn. And so here & there, there are some key places where His intellectual gifts really don’t matter very much. He offers an incomplete package of these intellectual gifts. Not incomplete in magnitude, but incomplete in coverage.

Update: Right here. This is what I’m talking about.

As far as the crappy legislation is concerned, I dunno. It was on the ropes…or, lumbering onward with extraordinary awkwardness. Obviously, this near-tragedy can be used in all kinds of interesting and disgusting ways to give the crappy legislation new life. Let’s just say this much for Sen. Reid: If he elects not to do that, it will favorably influence my regard for his character.

You can tell by the comments under the linked story, that it’s pretty easy to find some scolding against comments “attacking family members.” Not so easy to find the “attacking” comments themselves (it seems Politico had three of those, and whacked ‘em). Because of that, I have more concern about the scolds than about the attackers. They seem to be in a great big hurry to prove they are decent human beings in relative terms — by demonstrating some nameless faceless stranger, somewhere, is not as good as they are.

It makes me nervous when people get in that mode, especially when there is crappy legislation in the hopper. Some of them are bound to work in Congress. And there is a bad habit in there, I cannot help but notice, for people to try to redeem themselves — from what, I don’t know? — by voting yea on crappy legislation they might otherwise reject.

If the legislation is wonderful when you’re a glorious compassionate human being, it would be just as wonderful if you were a perfect asshole. Bad law, on the other hand, doesn’t anyone a good person.

This concern of mine is much bigger than the health care issue. Why were Sen. Reid’s family members rear-ended by that truck, anyway? Was the driver texting someone on a cell phone? Did he spill his coffee? Nod off after driving eleven hours without a break? Or maybe…God help us…just two? What other crappy legislation can we see tossed into the hopper because of this?

If there’s one thing I have absolutely no faith for anyone in Congress to say out loud…or even think to themselves…it is this: “That’s a terrible thing that happened right there, but there’s no sense trying to make a law about it because that’s just the way life is sometimes.”

Hat tip again to Quotalatiousness, via Gerard once again.

I’m thinking I need to go update this just one more time.

A dispute at a Lancaster movie theater during a screening of “Shutter Island” ended when a man, who had complained about someone nearby talking on a cellphone, was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.

The incident occurred two weeks ago at the Cinemark 22 theater in Lancaster, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The theater was packed for a 9 p.m. Saturday screening of the Martin Scorsese horror movie when the victim complained about a woman near him who was using a cellphone during the show. She and two men with her left the movie theater. Two men returned a few minutes later and stabbed the victim, said sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore.

“It was vicious and cowardly attack,” Whitmore said.

The victim, who was not identified, was hospitalized with serious injuries Two other moviegoers who came to the victim’s aid were also were hurt during the fight, officials said.

Meat thermometer? What the hell?

Almost as random and inefficient as a spoon:

I don’t wanna be that guy. Whoever is responsible for this screw-up.

Five months after repo men broke into her Hampton Township home and took her pet macaw, Angela Iannelli told Team 4 that it still feels like she “was raped.”

“I cannot walk into my house by myself. I tried it one time by myself, but the whole time, I was jumping like somebody was behind me and just started shaking.”

In a lawsuit filed this week, Iannelli claims that her mortgage company mistakenly targeted her house for foreclosure, and she said she came home one day to find that she had been locked out and someone had gone inside, cut the utilities, poured antifreeze into the drains and taken her bird.

“If you or I did to Bank of America what Bank of America did to my client, we would be in prison for 10 years,” said Iannelli’s lawyer, Michael Rosenzweig, partner at Edgar Snyder & Associates.

Team 4 reported that, in a lawsuit filed Monday, the homeowner says she was up to date on her mortgage payments — and out of the blue, Bank of America sent a contractor to invade her home in October and then padlock it.

For 20 years, Iannelli has maintained a residence on Fountainwood Drive. She says she never had a problem with her mortgage — always making the payments to Bank of America on time.

Iannelli told Team 4 investigator Jim Parsons that she got no notice from anyone at Bank of America that anything was wrong. The first time she realized something was amiss was that October day when she arrived home, took out her key, went to put it in the lock and realized that the locks had been changed.

And they took her bird too.

When the lawyer is salivating, it’s a bad sign.

Men are drawn to a wider range of women when they are feeling stressed out, according to research into the psychology of sexual attraction.

People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men’s preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found.

Relaxed men who took part in the study rated women on average 14% less appealing if they looked very different from themselves compared with women who looked similar. But a group of stressed men found dissimilar women 9% more attractive.
:
In the study, 50 healthy heterosexual male students were divided into two groups. Those in the first group were asked to plunge one arm into a bucket of icy water for three minutes before taking part in the test. Those in the second group were asked to do the same, but with water heated to body temperature.
:
Lass-Hennemann said it is highly unlikely that the acute stresses of everyday life can switch someone’s tastes when it comes to choosing a partner, but long-term stress might shift male preferences towards women who are more dissimilar.

So if you’re a wife and you’re getting into middle-age and feeling gravity taking its toll…a little frumpy around the edges. Henpeck your husband if you don’t want him trading in a 40 on a couple of 20’s. Uh, that’s new?

Someone needs to intervene in the decisions about what studies are being done, what they’re supposed to prove, how the grant money is being handed out. Seriously. We needed a study to give women motivation to do more nagging?? Who makes these decisions. We need reform now.

I’ll bet if you give me a few million dollars, I can produce a study that proves wives end up happier when they go way out of their way to make the man in their life happier. Men are less likely to flee the coop when they get handed a frosty mug of beer and a plate of nachos (or vegetables) every evening when they come home from work, and then get taken out for water sports on the weekends with their families. With the wife driving, so the adult refreshments can be enjoyed further. And then some fun in the sack every single morning and every single night. He’ll be, oh, about forty-five percent less likely to leave. Morgan’s study says so.

The data, they prove my theory. I can make some. Cheap. And they’ll be more believable than anything represented above, I think I’m in a position to promise that.

Update: Yesterday, Gerard put up something that fits in well with this theme. Further substantiates it. That theme being one of “happiness begins with men, and radiates outward to others.” When we channel our energies into making the grown-up men all stressed out and miserable, it comes back to bite us in the ass.

Picture’s worth a thousand words…

Wives — those among you looking to spice up your marriage. Greet him at the door with a cold drink wearing nothing but a smile. Do things his way and see what happens. Make him un-stressed.

It’s what my girlfriend does, and I can tell you perhaps the study that is the original subject of this post, has a point to it — her good treatment makes me exceptionally picky about women. Only she will do. You know, call me nuts, but I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Me, I’m wondering about the qualities of judgment of half of my fellow countrymen. And I mean that in a good way…trust me.