Blue Armadillo weblog

Saturday, May 26, 2001

The way I see it, Republican US Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma must have been high when he said "I don't think the moderates in our party are either isolated or neglected," which he is quoted as saying in this article on washingtonpost.com. It's such a blatantly false statement that it's hard to figure out what he had in mind when he said it. Of course, some of these Southern Republicans are so far to the right that they think letting the moderate Republican senators attend the caucus meetings is a major concession.
posted by John Heaton 10:35 PM | link

Friday, May 25, 2001

News about the economy bores me silly, but this article from washingtonpost.com about how the Bush Recession is affecting local small businesses was very interesting.
posted by John Heaton 8:31 PM | link

Animation legend Maurice Noble died a week ago today, but the crack obituary staff at the Washington Post just got around to publishing the obit today. When publishing obituaries, the Post puts you into one of three categories: Famous or Famous In Washington, Not Famous, and Not Exactly Famous But Well-Known Enough To Get An Obituary On The Wire. They tend to publish obituaries that fall into that third category only when they get enough of them to fill a reasonably large news hole. For example, they've been holding onto poor Maurice Noble's obit for a week now, but in the same column today is Whitman Mayo, who played Grady on Sanford and Son, who just died two days ago. I call these kinds of obits "Deaths You May Have Missed." But that's not the point.

The point is that Maurice Noble was an amazingly talented animator and designer who contributed to many of the -- and I'm not engaging in hyperbole here -- greatest animated features and short films of all time, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Fantasia, What's Opera, Doc, The Dot and the Line, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and the funniest cartoon ever made, Duck Amuck. Considering how many cartoons I watched while growing up and how many of those cartoons Noble worked on, it's safe to say that he was one of the most influential unseen forces influencing my developmental years.
posted by John Heaton 8:23 PM | link

When I was looking for a good Q*bert to link to today's journal entry, I ran across this history of Q*Bert by the guy who originally created the game. Did you know the game was originally called Snots and Boogers? I'll bet the game would have been more popular with that name.
posted by John Heaton 7:41 PM | link

Speaking of being amused by Republican reactions to the decision of US Senator Jim Jefford to leave the Republican party -- as I was yesterday -- I really enjoyed this Howard Kurtz article from the Washington Post. One right-winger is quoted as saying he'd like to see a live weasel sewed into Jeffords's intestine. Nice.
posted by John Heaton 3:41 PM | link

Salon has an interesting article about the so-called White House vandalism that I wrote about last week. They basically say the same thing I did, though with more detail and fewer potshots at Republicans. An interesting detail raised by the article but not commented on: the Washington Post, which more or less "broke" the "story" and covered it comprehensively before it was discredited, has, with the exception a brief uncredited wire story that ran the day the GSA issued its report, confined its coverage of the non-vandalism to washingtonpost.com. Both political correspondent Charles Babington and media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote about the report in columns that appeared online only. Why Kurtz didn't write about it in his weekly media column that runs in the print edition is a mystery, but if I had to guess I'd say it's not because the editors of the print edition are trying to cover up the fact that the White House played them for suckers on this one, but instead because Kurtz himself flogged the original non-story on his weekly CNN show Reliable Sources. Kurtz is a fine reporter but has historically been reluctant to disclose his own conflicts of interest, as noted by Mickey Kaus in Slate last year.
posted by John Heaton 10:28 AM | link

Thursday, May 24, 2001

I don't think Ed really ever lived up to its full potential this year. Yes, I enjoy the show, but all season it consistently finished second to Gilmore Girls in both the Light-Hearted Drama and Wacky But Lovable Neighbors categories. Nevertheless, Uncle Bob provides a hysterical recap of the season finale of Ed at Mighty Big TV. "So anyway...the season finale...with an ending so shocking that we will be talking about it all summer long. My guess is either that Ed dry-humps Carol on his living-room floor, or we get a close-up of Molly's insanely hairy rectum as a parting kiss. Either way, I'm already talking about it and summer's not even officially here yet." Hee!
posted by John Heaton 11:24 AM | link

I read in the Monday's LangaList that a major security hole has been discovered in the widely-used FormMail CGI script. The hole allows a malicious user to pass falsified HTTP_REFERRER value to the script, allowing them to use the script as an anonymous remailer for purposes of sending spam. Not good. A LangaList reader suugested an alternate CGI mail program called mailer, available for free at Geek Giveaways. It looks pretty good, but I haven't had time to mess with it yet.
posted by John Heaton 10:59 AM | link

Blah blah blah fishcakes.
posted by John Heaton 10:25 AM | link

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