January 30, 2003

You know, just when you think everything's going wrong, that life is one petty disappointment after another, and you're destined to be nothing more than a man of intermittant sorrow, you turn on your computer and see something as stunning as the
long-awaited return of the Ken Goldstein of the Week
which was created by Whybark and Frankenstein to promote
the grand opening of the Ultra-Swanky-Deluxe KGP Superstore
and you realize that Great, the frigging restraining order must've expired! Now I gotta spend another six hours filling out paperwork down at the Muni Court! Effin' terrific!
You know, now that I think about it, if you're gonna leap over a tall building, wouldn't it have to be in a single bound? I mean, what other kind of bound could there be? It's not like you can just sort of leap halfway up and then leap again, though I guess you could leap onto a shorter, surrounding building and then re-leap to complete the job. I'll have to get back to you on this.

January 29, 2003

Ah, that feels so much better...oh pixelated banana on a donkey...you are my only true friend...
So, hey, did anybody catch the State of the Union address last night? Like always, one of my favorite things about the address is...um...yeah, where was I...one of my favorite...things...

You're all still thinking about that post, aren't you? Aren't you?!?!

Well, fine! Read it as many times as you want! I'm not ashamed of it, not ashamed of being a real human being with real feelings and real hopes, fears, and dreams! So no, I'm not gonna just delete it, because that post is a part of me, and deleting that post would be like deleting a bit part of me, plus it might mess up some of the comments and links and whatnot but mostly because it's me! So if you have a problem with that, I guess that just means you have a problem with me! And maybe that means you should just leave!

Christ, where'd I put that frigging tequilla...
Um...sorry about that last post...I shoulda learned never to mix tequilla and Pop Rocks...

January 28, 2003

Don't look at me! You know, underneath this charming and amusing exterior there's a bubbling cauldron of emotion, feeling, and teary-eyed wonderment that you folks out there just don't seem to care about. Why is that, I wonder. Don't any of you folks care about the real me, or is it nothing more than just holler after hoot of "Make me laugh, donkey-clown boy. Do that funny ha-ha and then go away." Is it? Is it?! *sniff*
oh lord please don't make me walk all the way to the path station in this cold cold world

January 27, 2003

Finally, some logical idiots! Hordes of drunken fans go nuts, set cars on fire, riot, and generally attempt destroy their home city after their team loses!
Hey, when you're done checking out CrackAficionado.com, you'll definitely want to click on this link, courtesy of the MSN.com "Strictly Business" section: Crack Office Dress Codes. Hmmm...I'm guess Rule #1 would be to try not to wear anything too flamable.
From the New Repbublic: Ryan Lizza's White House Watch: Stage Left.
There is a weird respect among Washington journalists for presidential candidates who come before their most loyal supporters and insult them. In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton spoke before a black audience at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. Rapper Sister Souljah, who had spoken to the group the evening before, had recently told The Washington Post that blacks would be justified in killing whites. Clinton criticized her for those comments, angering his audience and insulting Jackson.

The move cemented Clinton's reputation as a centrist Democrat who was not held hostage to his party's interest groups. The media cheered, and the phrase "Sister Souljah moment" was born. In subsequent campaigns, George W. Bush won praise when he criticized House Republicans for trying to "balance their budget on the backs of the poor," while pundits swooned for John McCain when he said his party was bought and paid for by corporate special interests.

So when the six Democratic presidential candidates spoke before a core Democratic interest group, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Tuesday night, one question that hung in the air of the Omni Shoreham ballroom was, which Democrat would "Sister Souljah" NARAL? The answer was nobody.
Wait — you mean you thought after that lengthy build-up there was actually gonna be a "Sister Souljah moment"? Nah, you've just fallen for that Classic Journalism Technique: the Wishful Thinking Reverse Lead.

You see, like most political events this one offered nothing newsworthy, with the candidates speaking to an abortion-rights advocacy group and, well...advocating abortion rights. So imagine that you're covering the event: you're listening to these action-packed speeches, taking notes, and the next thing you know you're daydreaming, "Boy, wouldn't it be great if Gephardt went ape-shit and started screaming 'Baby Killers!!!' or something like that?"

So instead of trying to differentiate the suits' various shades of blue you find yourself sketching out this terrific Sister Souljah lead, and if Gephardt actually promises to personally perform every tenth abortion in America if that will help get NARAL's endorsement...well, that just means it's the perfect time to bust out the old Wishful Thinking Reverse Lead and pray that Hillary jumps into the race.

January 26, 2003

Cash Money. With those big-name blog awards causing so much heartache and tsuris that nominated bloggers are actually withdrawing, some other folks like Jeff Jarvis and Dawn Olson and who knows who else are stepping up to the plate with their own new and as-yet-untainted blog awards. With that in mind I just want to make one thing perfectly clear:
The first blogger or group to bestow just about any kind of award or honor on us here at The Donk will be rewarded with a three-dollar...oh, let's just call it a processing fee, as well as some other cool trinkets from Donk HQ.
Yes, folks, we'd sure like to be called "Award Winning," but we need at least one award for that. Oh, and it just can't be us getting an award; it has to look like it's part of some group of awards. Thanks.
Well, I guess my prediction wasn't completely wrong. I mean, they did actually play a football game involving two teams with pirate-themed nicknames. Other than that, though... And he know he actually completed some passes once his team was down by 31 late in the 3rd, but is there anyone else who thinks that Rich Gannon's horrible night should vault him to or near the top of the list of worst Super Bowl performances ever?
XXXVII. I've been thinking all week that this should be a pretty good game until I realized that, hell, they're all supposed to be pretty good games. That's the whole point. With that in mind, I'm predicting a ho-hum 27-13 victory for the West Coast Pirates over the East Coast Pirates, with Rich Gannon completing something like 43 of 44 passes and taking home the MVP award. Of course, my prediction is subject to change, depending on which players were spotted coked up at three in the morning, a transvestite hooker on each arm.

As for the real game today, my Grid Pool numbers are NFC: 3 and AFC: 5, a result which has never happened once in the entire history of the game, so I ain't holding my breath. As for the halftime show, the sentence "Sting is expected to make a surprise appearance." pretty much sums it up for me.
Let's all wish a happy 40th birthday to the illustrious Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! (Warning: link mentions weird stuff. And Andrew Ridgeley.)
Speaking of the New Yorker. I know it's only a little Shouts & Murmurs piece and all, but I'm surprised that the New Yorker's celebrated fact-checking machine let the following through:
(from Bruce McCall's "Saddam's Surprisingly Sentimental Last Will")

It is my long-standing desire, and certainly not part of some diabolical escape ploy, that my valuable private collection of false Iranian, Panamanian, Paraguayan, and Syrian passports [...] be immediately FedExed to the address written on the scrap of paper stuck between pages 201 and 202 of the paperback edition of "Hollywood Wives" in the private library of my office suite at the Hall of the Heroes, Baghdad [...].
Now, I unfortunately misplaced by copy of "Hollywood Wives" during the move, but in every other book I own pages 201 and 202 are printed on opposite sides of the same piece of paper, making this an especially devious hiding place.

January 25, 2003

Hmmm...I don't think it's a good sign when you type your zip code into weather.com and the message "God Hates You!" starts flashing.

January 24, 2003

Via my old roommate Murph, a link to a sadly overlooked lifestyle magazine of recent years:
If you're a real Crack Aficionado, chances are you're a busy man. You're out there making the deals, changing the world. You work hard and you play harder. And let's face it: if you're going to walk down to the corner with five bucks in your pocket, it's not gonna be to buy some magazine. CrackAficionado.com is your solution.
This is the first magazine that's really spoken to me since Sassy shut down back in 94.
Well, on the positive side, at least nobody rammed into my car last night.
You know, this week just can't end soon enough for me.
Continuing the theme of defenses/attacks of New Jersey cities on the PATH line, Erin the Gigglechick spots and dismisses an incredibly silly attack on our beloved (okay, that's a bit strong) Jersey City. Here's a little sample:
Jersey City is a town of ghosts. It is a shanty town of old ideas and dreams. It is an opportunistic spurt that grew like a stalagmite, a deposit from the seeping drip of commerce across the river. As I waited for the light rail to take me to Newport, I could not help but feel the emptiness of the place. Canyons of office buildings of recent build. In their desolate, hurried growth they looked like cardboard boxes made to resemble stone and marble. The storefronts, empty. People milled about in huddled clusters, never straying far from the doors they came out of.
As Erin points out, perhaps the reason that the folks weren't hanging around outside is because it's like 20 freaking degrees below zero out there! If they stood outside for too long they'd freeze to death. The author of the piece, Pitchaya of Hands Free, is going to the Blogger Bash so I may get a drink thrown in my face, but in any case I'd be happy to list a few places around Jersey City that are vibrant and interesting and filled with people walking around and chatting and stuff — just not by the financial district, and not on the coldest day of the year.
Why you should be glad you're not me, #16 in an open-ended series. Sometime between the time I parked my car Wednesday night and left for work Thursday morning, somebody smacked right into it, leaving a big-ass dent that's gonna cost me some serious cash to fix. (No, of course the assailant didn't leave a note. I didn't even think of that remote possibility until a co-worker mentioned it, and I greeted the suggestion with one of the mirthless laughs I am becoming known for.) It's just this random Screw You from the heavens, a Community Chest card that forces me to shell out some C-notes to a shifty-eyed Rahway body shop owner to return my car to the unsmashed state it deviated from through absolutely no fault of my own. Feh! Feh on you, damned fate! Feh!

January 23, 2003

Well, I find this sort of thing interesting. In an article by Jeffrey Toobin in this week's issue, the New Yorker, which is sort of a standard-bearer for such literary matters, uses the term "bloggers" without any big explanation:
"Denunciations of the invitation to the poet [Tom Paulin] began surfacing among several conservative Internet bloggers — among them Andrew Sullivan and opinionjournal.com, the online counterpart to the Wall Street Journal editorial page."
I mean, there is the adjective "Internet" — to differentiate them from all those radio and TV bloggers, I guess — but it's sort of cool that the New Yorker assumes that people will just understand what a blogger is.

January 22, 2003

Oh, and just so Whybark doesn't think he's the only one out there getting the mad referrals, I'm happy to announce that I am somehow Google's #3 source for Tecca Zendik news! Remember, folks: when Mideast strongmen start hitting on California beauty pageant winners, The Illuminated Donkey is your first stop for news!
Bill Mauldin, perhaps the greatest editorial cartoonist in history, has passed away at the age of 81. Mauldin's WWII cartoons in Stars and Stripes magazine, starring his everyman soldiers Willie and Joe, were loved by countless servicemen and earned him a Pulitzer Prize, the first of two. Mike Whybark's site became a repository for messages left for the ailing Mauldin by WWII veterans and other admirers, and make for some nice tributes now that his suffering has ended.
We Are In Hell, If Hell Were Really, Really Cold, Which I Guess Is Sort of Un-Hell-Like But Just Go With Me Here. The freaking water in my freaking building (and maybe the whole freaking city) is shut off again for the second time since November. There are work crews outside my apartment, lights a-flashing, tearing up the streets, trying to fix the damn thing, but it looks like I'm probably gonna have to go to work tomorrow and paper-towel-and-liquid-soap myself down in the bathroom. Wheee.

Oh, and speaking of outside, have I mentioned that it's nine freaking degrees out, with a wind-chill that makes it feel like four freaking below, and that if all goes well it may peek above freezing by Monday, just in time for the freaking snow? What kind of a god would allow something like this to happen?
Paul Katcher, whose attendance at the Blogger Bash I'd look forward to more if I wasn't worried he'd nab all the action, offers his succinct and incisive views on one of the more pressing matters of the day: Why Everyone in Hoboken, NJ, Can Blow Me.
Yet Another Reason Why She's Too Good for the Likes of Him. Hey, if everybody's done complaining about some silly, meaningless blog awards that don't mean boo to a goose, we can finally get down to the important business of...um...congratulating one of our own on her nomination for one of them awards! Longtime Friend of the Donk (FOTD) Cindy Chaffin (who you may know as the much, much better friend of longertime FOTD Scott "Mr. Fat Guy" Chaffin) and her blog TexasGigs.com have received a 2003 Bloggie nomination for "Best Weblog about Music." If you folks love me even half as much as I pray each night that you do, then you'll head on over to the Bloggies balloting page and cast your vote for TexasGigs. It's Textastic!

(As a little side note, it's probably not a good sign when one of the nominess for "Best Tagline" was lifted from ESPN's Stuart Scott.)
The Illuminated Donkey's Amazing Exercise Fact, #3 in a Series.
So, you me be asking, would it be okay if I cut my workout in half today, since I'm not really into it and American Idol is almost on and you can kind of count the walk to the exercise room as exercise since, you know, I'm walking and I promise to exercise twice as hard tomorrow?

The answer is: Sure, what the hell do I care, it's your life.
Thank you, this has been The Illuminated Donkey's Amazing Exercise Fact, #3 in a Series.
ESPN's Page 2 grades every Super Bowl, from XXXIV all the way down to XXIV. In case you've put them out of your memory, this will remind you of the four-year parade of boredom that was 1992-1995. Ah, the memories...drunk in the second quarter and rooting for the commercials to start...

January 21, 2003

Via the Country Store, information on Thursday's Blog Day for Venezuela, as well as a link to The Devil's Excrement, which is covering the situation from the ground and includes links to many more related sites.
You New Yorkers out there will appreciate this great piece by Arthur Miller reminiscing about his early-1960's residence at the Hotel Chelsea.
The Chelsea in the Sixties seemed to combine two atmospheres: a scary and optimistic chaos which predicted the hip future, and at the same time the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family. That at least was the myth one nursed in one's mind, but like all myths it did not altogether stand inspection. The idea of family had limits. Unless one was drugged out, or spending one's days putting paint on canvas, words on paper, chisels on stone, or singing operatic arias at the piano, one found it difficult to hold [hotel owner] Stanley [Bard]'s attention. In fact, I cannot recall a single real businessman-guest, although some of that type may have frequented the regular all-night card games, like the one which caused a bit of a rumble when two hold-up men stationed themselves outside the room and robbed the happy winners as they emerged into the hallway.

But such mishaps were rare and would be denied by the management even though it gave the place a certain panache, or relief from real life's ordinary constraints. It was not, one thought, that Stanley cultivated weird people, potheaded layabouts and some extraordinary as well as morbidly futile artistic types, but simply that he seemed to think these dreamers were normal; it was the regular people who made him uneasy.
The Chelsea of Miller's time was home to such figures as Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Arthur C. Clarke, and later became newly infamous when Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in Room 100. It was not, however, where Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol despite Miller's odd, uncorrected memories of the event.

January 20, 2003

Hey, folks, let's all give a big Illuminated Donkey welcome to Erin the Gigglechick, a fellow Jersey City resident who looks like Ally Sheedy, performs stand-up, draws, designs websites, and basically makes me look like a lazy lump of crap. Dammit, Jersey City needs more go-getters like her!
The Illuminated Donkey's Amazing Exercise Fact, #2 in a Series.
Curious how many more calories you'll burn off if the exercise room TV is showing something decent like The Simpsons or Jeopardy! rather than some blah-blah-blah show like the Nightly Business Report on PBS or Lou Dobbs or something, not that you couldn't ask the guy on the treadmill if you can change it but he seems kind of into the whole treadmill thing and you don't want to break his stride, so to speak?

The answer is: At least four-to-five times as many calories!
Thank you, this has been The Illuminated Donkey's Amazing Exercise Fact, #2 in a Series.
A few days ago I presented some choice excerpts from a supposedly semi-fictional Iraqi-based SWM looking for a little love. Well, Marc Weisblott was kind enough to point out that perhaps Mattvadervonian wasn't actually making stuff up, but simply taking dating lessons from his neighbor and noted Hunka-Hunka Burnin' Love Muammar el-Qaddafi!
(We pick up the story as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, accompanied by 40 Italian journalists, has landed in Libya for a one-day visit.)

As Berlusconi was whisked off to Qaddafi's headquarters in Bab el-Azziziya, the attendant journalists followed aboard a government-supplied bus. [...] Once admitted to the inner compound, the journalists were led across the grounds to the three-story ruins of Qaddafi's old home. Across its shattered facade, floodlights illuminated an enormous banner touting something called the Miss Net World beauty contest, with its hopeful slogan: ''Beauty Will Save the World.'' [...] Rather than being off somewhere hammering out a deal with Berlusconi, Qaddafi had apparently spent much of the evening chatting with the beauty contestants in his Bedouin tent.

''It was really great,'' exclaimed Tecca Zendik, a statuesque 19-year-old from Southern California who represented the United States in the pageant. ''He was very nice and really humble. They had put out this special chair for him, but instead he sat in this ordinary plastic chair like everyone else.'' ''And the tent was really amazing,'' added Miss United Kingdom, Lucy Layton. ''It had these beautiful carpets and these silk tapestries on the walls. It was like something out of 'Arabian Nights.'''

It appeared there had also been a bit of drama in the tent. When Qaddafi began a critique of American policy toward his country, including the 1986 air attack that killed his infant daughter, Tecca grew emotional and began to cry. Taking notice, Qaddafi moved her to the seat beside him and comfortingly patted her hand as he continued his talk. ''He wants me to come back again tomorrow night,'' Tecca said, looking as if she might start crying again. ''I mean, this is all kind of overwhelming. I've never been out of the States before, and here I am meeting Qaddafi.''
Surprising, Tecca didn't win that pageant; the crown went to the aforementioned Lucy Layton. And while many girls might be disappointed that they didn't take home the coveted Miss Net World crown, Qadaffi made sure to cement the budding Tecca relationship with a few special gifts: a watch featuring his face surrounded by diamonds and Libyan citizenship plus a position as Honorary Consul to the United States. Sure makes your chocolates and dozen roses look like a pile of crap, don't it?
The Illuminated Donkey's Health and Exercise Fact of the Day, #1 in a Series.
Wondering what percentage of calories consumed in an average chinese buffet lunch followed by a whole bunch of cookies and cake brought in for some accounting guy's birthday are burned off during a 30-minute workout on one of them ski-track exercise machine doohickeys?

The answer is: 100% of them.
Thank you, this has been The Illuminated Donkey's Health and Exercise Fact of the Day, #1 in a Series.

January 19, 2003

You know, you gotta hand it to Paul "Casanova" Frankenstein. And why is that? Well, after making it home way uptown after a night of drunken revelry and carousing, he still finds the energy for a quick 3:30 a.m. post relaying an amusing anecdote. Then, less than seven freaking hours later, he's not only alive, but awake and posting again, like some kind of...super...posting-type...guy.

But yes, it was a delightful night of delight in honor of the lovely Miss G.I. Jane. I gave her jars of crunchy peanut butter and Fluff from the Peanut Butter & Co. restaurant in Greenwich Village, and we learned that not only do many people make unfortunate fashion choices, but that occasionally those same UFC-suffering women will walk in such a manner that will make them resemble a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

January 17, 2003

you know i think it's peanut better jelly time again i'm sorry
From the Salon Personals (where for some reason I decided to browse the Iraq section), I present selected highlights from the profile of "mattvadervonian," a six-foot-tall 190-pound blonde (it's his Iraqi-Celtic heritage) high-ranking official based in Baghdad and looking for a little love.
Best (or worst) lie I've ever told:
'People like you. I mean people really like you. They really really like you. And I don't think you should let this UN shit get ya down. So get your chin up and go back out there and let 'em have it'

If I could be anywhere at the moment:
On the Tigris with 12 pack and some hand grenades.

The five items I can't live without:
  1. Saddam
  2. Tea
  3. Hand Grenades (They really do make fishing a whole lot easier)
  4. My Crew-everybody around me that makes things run smoothly: Tariq, Muhammed, Saddam Jr, and, of course, let's not forget Todd Oldham. Todd you're a sweeeeeeeeetie!
  5. Bedpans
Fill in the blanks:Saddam is sexy; Sajida Talfah (Saddam's Wife) is sexier.

Why you should get to know me
I'm strong, sensitive, and I'm being fast tracked within the regime. You're looking at a star.
It's funny, because it's not true!

January 16, 2003

People Hate Me. For reasons which I cannot even begin to fathom, a certain LeNor Barry of Minneapolis sent me the following:
You are a jackass, obviously. Hope you evolve, maybe next life you will be a dung beetle. In your view I'm sure that would be progress!
This is the second piece of hate mail I've received so far this month. 2003 is shaping up to be the year of hating Ken Goldstein.

January 15, 2003

Thanks to the Always-Looking-Out-for-Me Mr. Fat Guy, I have a brand-new theme song and promotional video! Oh, dear Lord, I think it make me go crazy! And then when I go the crazy, I like to look at the this!

January 13, 2003

Paul “Casanova” Frankenstein today released his long-awaited Guide to Deciphering What the Other Sex Is Saying, and elsewhere uses the term “pull” in a suggestive manner. That's right, folks: Paulie F's working blue!
I suppose if you're going to break my heart by telling me that my childhood sweetheart, Jennifer Connelly, had gotten hitched to some lousy Brit, the least you can do is temper my disappointment by using some giant-spooky-head-grinning-Joker's-daughter-looking photo to accompany the article. I feel much better now.

January 12, 2003

Hmmm...apparently my theme this week is huge honking blocks of text.
When you wake up with a splitting headache, rummage around the bathroom looking for non-existent aspirin and/or Tylenol, groggily conclude “Well, I’m sure that these Acetaminophen with Codeine I smuggled back from Canada will be even better,” you might as well just kiss the next 18 hours of your life goodbye.

In other exciting news, I am now the proud sponsor of the Kent Tekulve page on the truly indispensible Baseball-Reference.com. I became a big fan of Tekulve's during his days with the Phillies, years after his peak with the Pirates, and I tried unsuccessfully for years to copy his sidearm style. I'll never forget him come in to face Gregg Jefferies with two outs and the go-ahead runners on, late in a Reds-Mets game. It was the last season of Tekulve's career and the first full season for the highly touted Jefferies, the latest obnoxious budding star for the obnoxious Mets in the obnoxious 80's. I remember my brother, a big Mets fan, laughing at this goofball warming up, taunting me with predictions of just how hard the young phenom would hit the washed-up reliever. My friends, Jefferies struck out swinging, with three swings that weren't within a foot of the pitch. Lord, that was a beautiful moment. Thanks, Kent.

January 10, 2003

Dot's All! You know who was kind of a marketing genius? The guy who came up with the whole "club sandwich" thing. I mean, I'd have felt a bit guilty for ordering a sandwich with a pile of fatty, fried bacon, but somehow ordering a club sandwich makes it feel A-OK! ... Hey, if we ever get another chance to engineer the human body, let's see what we can do about not stuffing the teeth with highly sensitive nerves wired straight to the brain's pain center. ... The Compassion of Our D.M.V. Officials, Part 8 (taken from the back of my vehicle registration): "Compulsory insurance is the law. A tragedy occurs whenever you or someone close to you suffers a loss due to an uninsured vehicle." But hey, your mom just got plowed down by an insured tractor-trailer? Why, that's just peachy-keen! ... Attention editors of every single magazine I subscribe to: Yes, I get the message, online dating is fascinating and wonderful and skyrocketing in popularity and the only way anybody will ever fall in love starting right now. I have received the information repeatedly, so please leave me alone now. Okay, except you, Bill. ... Wow, the 14th Annual Big Apple Blogger Bash already has 25 RSVP's! That's more than the 1990-1993 BABB's had put together! ... Goshamighty, if there's a better album spoken-word opener than the one to Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True,"
"What are you doing back?" "I sat back and thought about the things we used to do. They really meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me." "Do I really mean that much to you?" "Girl, you know it's true!"
then I sure as hell don't want to know about it!

January 09, 2003

Bleh.

January 08, 2003

Mike and the Mad Donk. Any baseball fans out there interested in the recent Hall of Fame elections, the history of relief pitching, the fate of Kevin Millar and Todd Hollandsworth, or hundreds of other subjects related to the only real game will definitely want to check out Mike's Baseball Rants — he's the Steven Den Beste of America's Pastime! Plus, if you write to him, he'll probably write you a long and interesting letter back!

January 07, 2003

Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement Information. Music distributors and retailers illegally conspired to fix CD prices, so if you purchased a CD between 1995 and 2000 (and I'm guessing you did), you're eligible to receive between $5 and $20 in the settlement. Click on the above link for details.
Thanks to the always vital Damian Penny for ridding me of the misconception that the Raelians were just harmless kooks who appear every few years and convince the media to fall for their cloning tales. Penny links to the Rael-operated Subversions site and excerpts the most disgusting libel you're ever likely to read, that the Israeli military has executed over 1000 Palestinian women and children, and that
[O]ver 4,000 Palestinian prisoners are presently incarcerated in concentration camps and being interrogated under torture. There is even a project underway to cremate not only the rotting corpses but also those still in a coma, or unconscious due to their treatment, so as to completely eliminate all evidence of torture.
That's the lowlight, but there's plenty more where that came from.

Did Baseball Bloggers Scoop Big Media on the Hall of Fame? Um...nope. InstaPundit maven Glenn Reynolds today linked to this supposed scoop by the impressively exhaustive Mike's Baseball Rants, uncovering an encrypted Associated Press file featuring Gary Carter's career stats, taking this to mean that the AP had advance word of Carter's election and was readying the info for the announcement. However, I was able to locate similar files for all-time saves leader Lee Smith, who fell about 160 votes short and Ryne Sandberg, who also missed. I'm guessing that similar pages are up somewhere for other Hall hopefuls like Blyleven and Rice, not to mention their well-polished Bob hope obituary.

January 06, 2003

At Last. Once the PBS Media Matters show "A Trip to the Blogosphere" airs, my friends and family will no longer think that bloggers are some weird little hobbyists or geeks obsessing on the minutiae of our dull lives. Yes, they'll finally understand that we're crazed zombies who want to eat your eyeballs and suck your souls out through the little holes.
Welcome to the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Greatest Quote Ever Regarding the Loss of One's Extremities Through Frostbite by Somebody Who Was Portrayed in the Movie Dramatizing His Ordeal by TV's Douglas "Doogie" Howser.
January 6, 1993

Jim and Jennifer Stolpa were stranded by a blizzard on a desolate Nevada road with their five-month-old son, Clayton. Jennifer huddled in a tiny cliffside cave with Clayton while Jim trudged 48 miles through hip-deep snow to find help. Jennifer, who, like Jim, lost all her toes to frostbite as a result of the ordeal, says, “I can’t wear heels, I can’t wear sandals. I have to wear tennis shoes all the time. It kind of sucks.” Says Jim, “We really miss our toes.”
Thank you, this has been a special presentation of The Greatest Quote Ever Regarding the Loss of One's Extremities Through Frostbite by Somebody Who Was Portrayed in the Movie Dramatizing His Ordeal by TV's Douglas "Doogie" Howser.
Attention National Football League Directors: I know that the odds are pretty low of this happening, but if I'm ever the coach of a team that blows one of the biggest leads in the history of the playoffs, but it turns out that we really should have had a chance to run our horrendously botched game-winning field goal attempt again due to a blow call by the refs, how about keeping that little nugget of remorse to yourself rather than rubbing the salty apology into my gaping wound?
And now we present the 2003 debut of a longtime favorite here at The Donk: The Link Roundup!
The results for this year's Hall of Fame voting (click for the full ballot with links to player info) will be announced tomorrow, but the always exhaustive Baseball Primer has been debating the topic for about a month, while Baseball Prospectus has presented the final results of their balloting, in which only two players (Eddie Murray and Gary Carter) reached the magic 75% total. My own vote pretty much went along with the BP consensus, with me also including third-place Bert Blyleven as well as Goose Gossage and Jim Rice (though Rice is admittedly more of a personal favorite).

Right now there's a whole bunch of very good offensive players from the 70's, guys who seemed like HoFers at various points in their careers: besides Murray, Carter and Rice we have Andre Dawson, Steve Garvey, Dale Murphy, Keith Hernandez, and Dave Parker. And I haven't even mentioned Ryne Sandberg, Lee Smith and Jack Morris...basically, depending on where you draw the line, you could make a case for either one or 15 players being HoFers.

January 02, 2003

If I owned a calendar, I'd mark it!
Why are we as a society wasting our time worrying about yummy and harmless fast food while the real culinary killers are allowed to roam free?!
Happy 1-2-3 Day everybody! (Well, I guess any European and assorted whatnot visitors will have to wait until February 1 for the big celebration.)

January 01, 2003

Yeah, I still dunno...shouldn't everything be...shinier or something? I think I'll go make a sandwich.
Ohmygod...Robbie kissed Barbie last night!!! Aaiieeeee!!!
Anybody remember hearing about the great Jersey City boom of the last year? Well, it's already over.
I dunno...it still seems like everything's exactly the same. I think I'll go get some eggs.

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