I just sold off my Hasbro stock, for $18.52 per share. I bought it in 1999, at prices varying from $18 to $27. It was heading up! I decide to buy it based on the apparent strength of the Pokemon toys Hasbro was then preparing to sell. I figured shoot, even if the economy goes in the tank, people always buy toys, and this Pokemon stuff is hot. Pokemon my ass. It was heading up, like when you’re at the top of the roller coaster, and you get that feeling of impending gravity sucking your stomach up into your sinuses. Anyway, I gave it the full five years — mostly out of benighted indifference — and I don’t feel like playing with toys anymore. Bleh.

“Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,” soccer player Salih Sadir told the website of Sports Illustrated magazine over the weekend, after demanding that U.S. troops get out of Iraq. ‘He can find another way to advertise himself.”

And after Iraq’s defeat of Australia on Saturday, coach Adnan Hamad Majeed criticized Bush for “helping to destroy our country.” He said that “we will never believe that Bush is with us.”

from the Los Angeles Times

Spotted via All That Arises.

History News Network: “Being Pro-War Is Not Necessarily Patriotic”

worth reading!

It’s midnight and I just stepped out of the shower. I feel oh, so much better. I washed my hair, toned and moisturized my tired, middle-aged face. I’m ready to slip between the sheets and dream of a better world … Hmmm ….

• A world in which Get Some is my motto, not the unofficial motto of the Marines.
• A world in which dogs live as long as people, and people are as loyal as dogs.
• A world in which we don’t forget what our grandparents have told us, or what our parents have done for us.
• A world in which all the grave diseases are curable, because we decided that was more important in the budget than war.
• A world in which nothing human is destructive to humans; in which no one is obsessed with anything they can’t have any of or get enough of.
• A world in which every person and animal has a home, and peace therein.

Nighty night.

Guess what I got this evening. A mosquito bite. I shit you not. West nile is here in California, and I get the first mosquito bite I’ve gotten in this town in I don’t know how many years. We don’t have mosquitos here. Famous last words.

[Link]

OK, there’s a lot going on today, from a stolen scream in Norway to more BS about Kerry’s war wounds. (I would’ve tought Bob Dole was above this sort of raw sewage; apparently not.) But none of it is as fun or as newsworthy as Butt Paste.

“Retired Louisiana pharmacist George Boudreaux hasn’t needed Madison Avenue pitchmen to get the word out about his concoction to treat diaper rash. He just lets the name do it for him: Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. “Would you be talking to me if it was called George’s Diaper Cream?” Boudreaux recently asked a reporter.”

[Link]

I mean heckling Bush. Think that’s The American Way? Fired for exercising free speech outside the job? It’s the American Way with Bush as president, that’s for sure.

Jeckel was campaigning from a secure, undisclosed, location.

[Link]

“In the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed

were angry at the changes taking place in America.”

— Matthew Dallek, “The Conservative 1960s” – book review,

Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1995.

If only they’d been right, huh?

What can we learn from this? That we have gone from being a people who abhorred the reactionary paranoia of Iron Curtain autocracy to a people who embrace it, feed and pet it, and set it at the gates of our hearts and homeland, like a purblind mastiff in the hall. So long as that beast lays apost, we’re trapped by the fear we have bred.

“U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government’s secret no-fly list.

Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed. “

The Bush administration has created a monster of fear and loathing in response to 9/11. It will continue to grow and feed on civil rights, unless and until we turn back and learn a new way to live as a nation in the world community. In this article, it’s reported that the Transportation Security Administration will issue citizens a letter showing they’ve been cleared for travel — that they’re not on the secret watch list. The next step, obviously, is an internal Federal passport, just like in Russia.

Just another good reason, among so many, to vote George W. Bush out of office in November.

Washington Post (Registration Required)

Over at Buddha’s Den, Buddah explores the role of the Smoothie in the life of real men such as myself.

Here in Santa Barbara, where we men all paddle out into the pacific and play smack-down grab-ass with great white sharks for our manly amusement, we have a small chain of smoothie shops called Blenders in the Grass. My favorite is the Tropical Pineapple with Vitamin C and Ginseng … the latter gives me that extra zip of energy for the shark-smaking.

I hope this lays down the law on smoothies. When you’re swimming with sharks, it’s not good to act like bait.

“If we approach others with an aim to change them rather than an aim to know them, to love them and to exemplify a better life for them, we ourselves ugly with arrogance in the process.”

— ChristianityToday.com , quoted in Time.