What a jackass

Just received the following message from http://www.authentic-campaigner.com/ regarding my choice of username:

• Far be it for me to suggest a screen name, but for membership to the Authentic Campaigner Forums, one's posts would be taken more seriously if their screen name wasn't taken for a character in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western ... and their email address wasn't a character in a science fiction triad.
  
  67.64.114.186 / Arch.Stanton / Aloysius Bosch / Dallas, TX / Reenactor / han.solo@prodigy.net
  
  Please re-apply with non-movie (hopefully Civil War related) identifiers.
  
  Scott McKay, moderator
  Authentic Campaigner Forums

Here is my reply:

Dear Mr. McKay,

Thank you for the suggestion. The email address will not change as it is the one I use for exchange with my college students. Yes, it's whimsical, but I like it.

What would be a more serious name? I see that "Zoidy13," "AmazingKenneth," "Artillery_Dude," "hireddutchcutthroat," "theotherguy," and "Saturn the Giant" have already been taken. I have no desire to be Boba Fett, Han Solo, Tron, or General Lee; furthermore, I had intended to sign my real name to posts. I did not realize that the login name needed to be as sincere as your message suggests.

I look forward to your reply and remain,

Your Obedient Servant,

AB

The Authentic Campaigner is a message board for "hardcore and progressive" hobbyists. It is otherwise a well-respected source of information for Civil War hobbyists. Too bad. I'm not holding my breath regarding my ability to post, read, etc., messages about a FUCKING HOBBY!!!

The Onion = Genius

"Ashcroft Loses Job to Mexican"

http://www.theonion.com/

Sometimes it's the simplicity that makes it so great. I laughed hard, then blogged.

You are, Number 6.

Who are you?

I am Number 2.

Who is Number 1?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sixofone.society/

I am not a number; I am a free man!

Map Maniacs, or are they Mapists?

Greenland is nowhere near as big as Africa.

I want to get that out into the open just in case the cartographers over at http://www.petersworldmap.org/ decide to send over a couple of pipe-hittin' nigga's to go medieval on my ass. Or you can order a copy of the Peters Projection at http://www.petersmap.com/. Whichever site you choose, these folks are loopy for maps, and they gimme the jibblies. Far more reasonable seem to be those nice fellers at the University of Wisconsin: http://www.geography.wisc.edu/maplib/rob_proj.html. Their map, the Robinson Projection, is the "aesthetically pleasing" map, an appeal not only to the senses but to the laws of diminishing returns.

From what I've been able to gather, if Robinsonians and Petersites meet in public, they go at it like the Jets and the Sharks. Robinson, before his death last month, used to claim that the Peters Projection made the continents look like wet flannel underwear hanging out to dry. Meanwhile, critics of Robinson say that he spent too much time making it look pretty and not enough time getting the distances right. Peters, the Rodney Dangerfield of the cartographic world, seems to have attracted a devoted cult of mapmakers who deify him like martyred cleric. No word yet from Tony or Maria.

Next up on Celebrity Deathmatch: Arthur Robinson vs. Arno Peters! Even more exciting than Annie Sprinkle vs. Ayn Rand!

This sounds familiar... again...

Hey, you, stop that and take a look at this Fallujah bidness. We've breezed through 80% of the city with only occasional resistance, and it appears that most of the insurgents have simply abandoned their stockpiles of weapons and fled. We don't actually hold 80% of Fallujah, and in some of that 80% there have been pop-up attacks on our flanks by individuals, b-b-b-but now waitaminute and follow me here...

Isn't this the same thing we did when we first got to Iraq? Are we doing the same thing again in the same fucking conflict?

Okay, kinda blasphemous, possibly...

At 9:55pm local Dallas time, NBC news broke in with AN URGENT UPDATE!!! Yasser Arafat died. Not exactly an Aristotelian tragedy, but I'm certain that some sectors of the world probably took this news a little harder than the Bosch household.

Anyway, pretty much everyone in the world had it figured out that he was in media res of shuffling off this mortal coil (everyone except that PLO guy who insisted even until this morning that Arafat was in a "deep sleep"); so what bothers me is my own reaction to this news: not worry, concern, sympathy, regret, loss, or anything else a remotely savvy world citizen might feel at the loss of a leader of humans. Rather, I questioned why NBC News broke in on the last few minutes of a tv show to tell us.

I'm not crazy. The media are describing him as statesman, patriot, Nobel Prize winner and terrorist in the same breath. I wonder how many of my other fellow Americans went, "Hmph. Arafat's dead. I wonder if the next Bachelorette will be a hot black chick?"

May 19, 2005

Let the countdown begin!

For those of you with no idea of the significance of said date, the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is at www.Starwars.com .

But then if you're checking here, you're probably as big a geek as I am anyway.

Thank you, George. Even if your movie sucks... well, at least you know how to build anticipation.