Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
For all of the folks in Facebook who invite me to participate in a game: Sorry, don’t have the time to play them, and I distrust a lot of the join-this stuff in Facebook anyway. For all the folks anywhere who invite me to events out of town (Chicago): Sorry, too laid up after the [...]
At the present, my LEFT foot surgery has been rescheduled for the 5th of July; hopefully nothing else will blow that out of the water. My RIGHT foot – well, went to see a podiatrist on that, and he took new X-rays of my foot that show how crippled up it looks (which never fails [...]
Going to the emergency room with another leg infection, this time from a gash on my right leg…been doing what I could to reduce things over the last few days since I got the gash, but it’s getting red and heating up. You can’t imagine how upset and annoyed I am about this. More later; [...]
A new book on the 2008 presidential season with lots of behind the scenes goodies has a lengthy excerpt bit on the New York magazine size, where John and Elizabeth Edwards get seriously toasted: entitled “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster” if that gives you a heads-up. It’s pretty brutal. The line that kept coming [...]
I’ve gotten over whatever the heck I was dealing with, but Susan and Mere have been miserable for the last few weeks on and off with what looks to be an allergy to the Christmas Tree. Susan thinks it’s the tree as allergen, her mom thinks it’s something that was sprayed on it, but in [...]
Screwups at Arlington National Cemetery have misplaced cremated ashes re-buried as ‘unknown soldier’ because they scooped out the urn when digging a hole at a gravesite. dumped the dirt in their landfill, and only later found out the dirt contained an urn with ashes….
Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town. Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
Big jump in the rates of teen cases of STDs and syphilis and teen pregnancies during the Bush administration, according to the CDC. A different sort of ‘don’t ask, and we won’t tell you’.
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 [...]
ORPHAN: My readers quietly passed along some information on this still-yet-to-open movie that I trashed earlier…and a little more information on a personal note. Susan talked to Mere, and she got the impression from Meredith that the sheer scariness of the poster got to Mere more than anything else. Arthur passed along this article from [...]
New Zealander taekwondo champ trying to open a whorehouse in his home country to support his bid to go to the London Olympics in 2012. Well, it’s not as nice as a Wheaties box…
Got home from the hospital late Friday in time to attend a family dinner (which was very nice with all the trimmings) but have not been up to much. Way too tired. Slept most of Saturday, except to fix some problems that the kids had had with the DVD player in the bedroom (they’d put [...]
Like nobody had ever heard of Russians using hookers to lure Western diplomats into compromising positions. Sheesh. The more I hear about the whole Senator Ensign story, the more I think that sex aside, the man should resign his office because he’s a crook and an idiot. Getting your bazillionaire parents to pay off your [...]
I can’t read the love letters from Governor Sanford to his girlfriend without this going though my head. Sorry. As one right-wing blog said today: Under different circumstances I think he could have survived this, but it’s a quirk of our politics that voters don’t mind cheating as much as they do inept cheating. Infidelity [...]