Ontario Empoblog

It's freedom fighers, John. Freedom fighters. Confess the error of your ways : Gitmo guards often attacked by detainees By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer The prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terror have attacked their military guards hundreds of times, turning broken toilet parts, utensils, radios and even a bloody lizard tail into makeshift weapons. Pentagon incident reports reviewed by The Associated Press show Military Police guards are routinely head-butted, spat upon and doused by "cocktails" of feces, urine, vomit and sperm collected in meal cups by the prisoners.... Guards currently stationed at Guantanamo describe a tense atmosphere in which prisoners often orchestrate violence in hopes of unnerving their captors, especially with attacks using bodily fluids. "I mean, seeing a human being act that way, it's terrifying. ... You are constantly watching before you take your next step to see if something is about to happen," Navy ...

All times are Pacific, but I wasn't . 12:00 noon: We are at a Starbucks in Henderson, Nevada, getting ready to head back home to Ontario after a weekend in the Las Vegas area. We're going home! 12:20 pm: We pass the St. Rose hospital on the south side of Henderson, Nevada. We're going home: 12:30 pm: We're on the southbound Interstate 15. We're going home! 12:40 pm: Traffic is really slow. We aren't going anywhere. 1:00 pm: Time to check the desert's radio source of information, the empire of Highway Stations broadcasting between 98 and 100 MHz in the Mojave Desert. Turns out there were two fatal accidents earlier in the day. One is cleared, but one (4 miles north of Primm) is not cleared yet, and all but one lane is blocked. We are approximately 15 miles north of this accident. It's gonna be a long day - even BEFORE we get to the California state line. Later I found out the details : Four people were killed in two traffic crashes within hours of each ...

Continuation . From Virtual Finland : In the autumn of 1899 [Jean] Sibelius composed the music for a series of tableaux illustrating episodes in Finland´s past. The tableaux were presented as a part of the Press Celebrations held in November that year. The celebrations were a contribution towards the resistance to the efforts to increase Russian influence in the then autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. The music culminated in a stirring, patriotic finale, "Finland awakes". However, the music made an even deeper impact later in the year, when four of the parts, including "Finland awakes", were performed again in concert. "Finland awakes" soon came to be in great demand as a separate concert piece and Sibelius revised it in the following year, giving it the title Finlandia, as suggested in a letter from an anonymous admirer. (Sibelius later came into closer contact with this fan, Axel Carpelan, who became an indefatigable supporter and a self-appointed fund-r...

Mrs. Loquacious has entitled one of her posts Crown Me with Many Crowns . Perhaps I groaned because that is one of my least favorite hymns. Fairlington United Methodist Church used to sing it all the time, and I burned out on it. But I still haven't gotten tired of any hymn based on Finlandia. To be continued . From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

I heard the song again this morning on KROQ, and finally decided to figure out who sang it. Why? Because I'm intrigued by music, and this song is intruiging. While I love the acoustic bluegrass, and I love the dense electronica, I also love the sparse songs that have a little mixture of both. This particular song hits the minimal synthetica spot. Any time you can combine "three chord" and "Casio" in the same description, you know that you're dealing with a particular genre of music that I'd like to mine myself at one point. (Granted I'd throw in the hip-hop rhythms too, but it should still be an interesting mix.) In this case I couldn't help listening to parts of the vocals either. For me the great part isn't the way the chorus ends (love is hate), but how the chorus begins - for me, it's just great to hear these cliches delivered in a harsh monotone. So I did a Google search for the twin phrases "hold you close" and "tear...

From Yahoo : Floyd Landis' stunning Tour de France victory just four days earlier was thrown into question Thursday when his team said he tested positive for high levels of testosterone during the race. No comment. But if you're into bicycling men in spandex, go here . And no, I'm not going there . From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

According to what I heard on the Kevin and Bean show on KROQ , Harvey Levin is now working for tmz.com . This causes me to discount the wisdom of anything that tmz.com ever publishes. Allow me to explain. First, let me go back over twenty years and reveal my then-current list of completely worthless people: Geraldo Rivera and Margaret Trudeau. Trudeau earned her spot by disco-dancing the night away on the evening that her ex-husband got voted out of office. May 27 [1977]: Pierre and Maragaret Trudeau announce they are separating.... March 26 [1979]: Newspapers are serializing Margaret Trudeau's autobiography, Beyond Reason. The book, which reveals intimate details of the Trudeau marriage, is said to enrage the Prime Minister. He calls a May election in order, it is reported later, to prove that his estranged wife's confessions do not bother him.... May 22: Mr. Trudeau's Government is defeated by the Conservatives under Joe Clark. On election night, Mrs. Trudeau is photo...

Witness this . I'll insert comments throughout. Brushing aside warnings from Wal-Mart, the City Council approved an ordinance Wednesday that makes Chicago the biggest city in the nation to require big-box retailers to pay a "living wage." "It's trying to get the largest companies in America to pay decent wages," said Alderman Toni Preckwinkle. While allowing smaller companies in America to pay indecent wages, I guess. That must be OK. The ordinance passed 35-14 after three hours of impassioned debate. Good. At least 14 City Council members are sane. The measure requires mega-retailers with over $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay workers at least $10 an hour in wages plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010.... In other words, a very selective law which only targets a few firms (not just Wal Mart, as we'll see in a moment. If your company has less than $1 billion in sales, and if you build 89,000 square foot stores,...

There's a definite difference in understanding between cultures. I cannot understand any culture in which suicide bombing is considered to be a very good thing. And Hezbollah apparently cannot understand any culture in which people's lives are considered to be worth something : A senior Hezbollah official said Tuesday the guerrillas did not expect Israel to react so strongly to its capture of two Israeli soldiers. Mahmoud Komati [is] deputy chief of the Hezbollah's political arm.... His comments were the first time that a leader from the Shiite militant group has publicly suggested it miscalculated the consequences of the July 12 cross-border raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured and three were killed. "The truth is — let me say this clearly — we didn't even expect (this) response ... that (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," said Komati. He said Hezbollah had expected "the usual, limited response" from Isra...

While I'm keeping this blog...um... pure , I've gotten interested in other people who have become famous for no reason whatsoever. But it turns out that those of us in the United States only knew part of the Rula Lenska story. First, a recap of the part that we know: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she became famous in the United States as well for her Alberto VO5 hair products commercials that began with a closeup of her stating: "I'm Rula Lenska.." People assumed this was a product endorsement by a celebrity whose name the advertisers expected them to know, but it later was revealed that this was a marketing ploy. It worked, and thus in the United States she became famous for pretending to be famous. Most people there...believed she was just a model. At any rate, the 'discovery' that she was nobody famous in the US led to the eventual demise of her commercial 'starring roles.' It turns out, however, that she is an English actress with some c...

I made a mistake when I designed my experiment on Saturday, July 22 . That was the day in which I discussed the strategy which put Senator William Napoli's website at the top of Google searches for "sexist asshat." If you read to the end of that post, you probably figured out what my experiment was going to be. In case you didn't, I was (and still am) trying to ensure that the Ontario Technoblog is the first-listed search item when you perform a Google search for the words "top technoweenie blog." This morning, I realized the mistake that I made in my experiment: I used the term on the target page itself. Granted, after a couple of months (if I behave myself from now on) the term will scroll off the main page of this blog. Still, I've ruined the experiment by repeating the phrase in this blog, so any Google results are naturally faulty. Dang. Dang. Superdang . (This won't work; Google says that as of this morning, this term has been used about 242 t...

I have often stated in this blog that I am not trendy. However, I realized this morning that simply by virtue of living in California, I am trendy by default. To wit, the news recently reported that the average price of gasoline in the United States has risen above three dollars a gallon. To which I say: Boo hoo dang hoo. I checked my mileage/gas log this morning, and discovered that (except for a trip to Arizona and Nevada in late June) I have been paying more than $3.00 a gallon for gas since April. On April 19, I paid $2.859 a gallon for gasoline here in southern California. The next week, on April 26, I paid $3.099 a gallon. Since then, all of the gas that I have purchased in California has been up above three bucks/gallon. Unfortunately, we won't be trendy when the price goes back down, since California gas always costs more than average. Wanna move out here anyway? From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Loquacious Musings quotes Colbert: And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. I never thought that any of the Daily Show correspondents could make it on their own, because their characters were so one-dimensional (unlike Stewart, who was able to portray a range of dimensions - witness his comments on September 11). However, for whatever reason, the character played by Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report" has resonated with a lot of people. And what a character : By his own admission, Stephen Colbert specializes in playing "high-status idiots," a niche he refined as a venerable correspondent on The Daily Show and perfects as the host of The Colbert Report, a Daily Show spin-off that adroitly satirizes Bill O'Reilly's bullying media-age demagoguery. Colbert has gone to great lengths i...

Yes, MySpace is down. I wrote about it at the top technoweenie blog , but my writing didn't resurrect MySpace. So now I'm looking at writings on Interex , a pinheaded twit , and another example of inappropriate use of the word "fascist" . Pinheaded twit. I like it. Really . Sounds better than technoweenie . From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Hayley McQueen has been mentioned in passing several times in the Ontario Empoblog, but these three posts are probably the most significant: My lass, I didn't raise you to be a news presenter! (March 19, 2006) English football people...and golfing people, and horse racing people (April 2, 2006) Hayley McQueen on the World Cup (July 7, 2006) Excerpts: In England, it appears that the daughters of sports stars don't become boxers or whatever - they become newscasters (or presenters or whatever they call them over there)....Hayley didn't join Manchester United, but she didn't fall straight into presenting. She has at least one production credit, as producer of something called the Roary Roadshow Summer Special from Boro TV. While Blogpatrol has been iffy, it turns out that this blog has become one of the major sources of information about Hayley McQueen. (Korpi schmorpi, I guess.) In fact, a Digital Spy thread prominently mentioned a post in this blog....Gordon McQueen actu...

While commenting on the redbluechristian.com article ACLU SUES FOR ANTI-GAY GROUP , I ended up at Westboro Baptist Church's website - the famously named www.godhatesfags.com . When viewing the main page of the site, I noticed that they had quoted John 3:16. Coincidentally, I had also referenced John 3:16 in my response at redbluechristian.com. However, they had a different take on the verse. For the record, here's the verse : John 3:16 (New International Version) New International Version (NIV) Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society 16"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[a] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. a. Or his only begotten Son Westboro Baptist's conclusion about this verse : JESUS CHRIST DIED ONLY FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE. To support this interpretation, they reference some other verses: John 13:1 1It was just before the Passover Feast. Jesus knew that the time had come for him to ...

I just wrote a post about how Andrew Raff's temporary cancellation of his MySpace account , as documented in the WebProNews article MySpace Undeletes Ted Stevens Spoof (and at the PSHS-WVC Computer Science Unit blog) was probably not the result of some heavy-handed Murdoch control over MySpace. And I even mentioned a blonde Fox News anchor parody , along with the top technoweenie blog . But Blogger ate the post. Maybe I should be paranoid... From the Ontario Empoblog (Latest OVVA news here )

Good time for a reminder of the actual text of the first amendment to the U.S. constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. And before we get all hung up on the word "Congress," here's Section 1 of the 14th amdnement ( emphasis mine): All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws . Here's what usconstitution.net says...

The top technoweenie blog includes a discussion of the William Napoli Googlebombing case from a technical perspective. In this post, I'll take a look at what he actually said ( emphasis mine). FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Just three-quarters of a million people share a lot of space in South Dakota. They share a single area code and a small capital. But lawmakers in Pierre have put South Dakota in the vanguard of a renewed campaign to outlaw abortion. STATE SEN. JULIE BARTLING (D): There is a movement across this country on the wishes to save and protect the lives of unborn children. As you know, Justice Roberts and Justice Alito were just favorably placed on that board. There is still another chance that President Bush will have to place another justice on that bench. I think it's time to pass House Bill 1215 and protect the lives of the unborn. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Citing what they see as a more receptive or antiabortion high court, lawmakers easily approved a sweeping ban on the pro...

Continuing on the "fired blogger" theme, I looked at Michael Hanscomb's MySpace profile for the first time. I was intrigued by one item in his entry about his high school: Bartlett High School 1987-1991 Anchorage, Alaska Graduated: 1991 Student status: Alumni Degree: High School Diploma Clubs: German Club, Theater, Yearbook, Apathy Club, Orchestra, Choir, Swing Choir (Bear-A-Tones) I don't know about you, but "Apathy Club" hit me right between the eyes. Get an intelligent person in an apathy club, and what could happen? Well, Michael told us in his blog: My junior year, I was part of the infamous Apathy Club. While initially formed by Royce and a couple others as an excuse to hang out after school and watch movies (Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Strange Brew, and other such classic fare), in a feat that called question to our name, we actually managed to collect more cans in the annual canned food drive than the German Club, who had never been beat before. Whi...

I just wrote ( twice ) about yet another blogger firing, and now here I am again. By way of a preface, some of you know that this is not the only blog that I manage . I may have also mentioned that one of my blogs will never be seen by most of the people who read the Ontario Empoblog. That is because this particular blog is behind a corporate firewall. On this corporate blog, I do not post my latest musings on Kiira Korpi or the true visible church or whatever; instead, this blog is used for a particular corporate purpose. Christine Axsmith, an employee at B.A.E. Systems , also maintained a corporate blog. However, she didn't maintain it at B.A.E. Systems, because she was on assignment at another "firm." I won't tell you the name of the firm, but its initials are C.I.A . Axsmith no longer works at the CIA, and no longer works for BAE : Christine Axsmith...kept the “Covert Communications” blog on a top-secret computer network used by American intelligence agencie...