Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
The 97-year-old heir to the Caliphate and Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, died recently in Istanbul…he was the last heir to have been born during the Ottoman Empire (he was a 12 year old student in Vienna when the Empire was abolished) and he spent the rest of his long life in exile, living [...]
FOIA releases of a ton of emails to and from Governor Sanford of South Carolina’s office from various TV news types (most prominently MEET THE PRESS) offering all sorts of ‘we’ll act like we’re questioning you but we’ll make sure that you get all the softballs you want, and protect you from the nasties out [...]
Growing up as a boy in Dayton, I got familiar with the Great Miami River, which rolls wide and broad through the city – and never gets more than 25 feet deep. Apparently a guy was out fishing the other day with a pal, and decided out of the blue that he was going to [...]
No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.
I am singularly uninterested in the Jackson story. I’ve seen enough oddball celebrity circuses, and the really interesting and truly weird stuff will not come out for a while for most people. I expect more news circuses repeated endlessly on the news, and I will ignore them all. Finally, someone sems to be doing something [...]
…and I also find the idea of political murder and terror repugnant. I understand that you find Dick Cheney a sadistic MF, or a Army recruiter someone who is hurting your co-religionists by supporting the war, or you find Dr. Tiller a baby-killer. Fine. Then work constructively to bring people to justice, or to outlaw [...]
From my old home town of Dayton, Ohio: A Dayton Daily News supervisor accused of killing his wife and entombing her on the newspaper’s top floor managed to baffle detectives over her disappearance for five months until a tip led to the concrete grave, police said. “They won’t leave me alone,” Theodore Sinks is said [...]
Philip Jose Farmer dies in Peoria at the age of 91. And yes, the first for-sure memory of adult SF I have is Riders of the Purple Wage in Dangerous Visions, from my mom’s copy in or around 1967. And no, I still haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake or pretty much any other James Joyce.
My experience, after 30 years of my mom being in food safety for the USDA and 25 years with the EPA, is that a lot of outfits that violate the rules and end up ‘pizening’ the public one way or another don’t suddenly do so overnight or by oversight. They do it because they’re cheap [...]
Evan Dorkin’s take on the death of Patrick McGoohan. Very funny cartoon.
Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by. Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]
I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so. Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow. So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff. Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and [...]
Various Illinois politicos are asking for a pardon for former Governor George Ryan, whose corruption in office led to a lot of people in jail and several deaths. One paper wrote: “Instead of selling license plates, [Ryan] gets to make them.” Otherwise, Ryan will stay in jail till 2013. Good. Let him rot there.
The BBC is reporting about a family funeral home business (two parlors and a crematorium) on on the US east coast that was outdoing Burke and Hare in selling the dead bodies that came into the place: Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. [...]
I’ve posted here about a kid who was killed by a drunk driver outside of Dayton; the guy was convicted of aggravated vehicular homicide. He was just sentenced to five years in prison.