Who Were the Sea Peoples?

gives us some adult commentary on the political scene: "The Obammunist’s socialized health care legislation..." Oooh! "The Obammunist"! The only possible comeback would be something like "The DiLofascist." I think I will offer my services to Obama. "Wicked Witch Pelosi (D-Botox)..." Whoa! Tom ups the ante. But Tom, you forgot to mention Poopy-Pants Boxer (D-DooDooLand) or Skunk Breath Sanders (D-Uranus). "It’s more like Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law that drastically reduced the number of Europeans who could immigrate to the U.S., more than half of which voted Republican, while vastly expanding Third World immigration quotas, almost all of whom vote Democrat." Who even knew quotas were allowed to vote?

care about public opinion .

You know how Apple would advertise with the young hipster representing Macintosh and the nerdy guy representing Windows PCs? Well, Microsoft has escalated: during the NCAA tournament, Microsoft is running ads with a black man representing Windows. Word is out that Apple is furiously seeking a lesbian, Rastafarian poet with whom to strike back.

I have an iPhone. At my house in Pennsylvania, I can't get cable or satellite Internet service, but I did notice that my iPhone was loading e-mail and web sites quicker than was my dial-up connection on my computer. So I asked AT&T if they had something that would get me on the 3G network from the desktop. Sure, the rep told me, they have a little USB cell phone that would connect for me. So I got the thing, which involved signing up for a two year contract with an early termination fee. This worked fine... for about a year. Then, AT&T "upgraded" their 3G network, and I haven't been able to connect since, from either my phone or computer. After waiting a couple of months to see if the service would ever come back, I called AT&T and asked them to stop billing me for the service they were no longer delivering. The first person I talked to was sympathetic, but said she would have to put me in touch with a manager, because she could not waive the terminati

'If we find a man whom we respect as a sensible and thoughtful person confessing that he was once led into materialism or Mormonism or murder, we expect him to be able to tell us what it was in these things that he found worthy to attract him.' -- R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

how many are perfect after one day of play? "All the upsets caused havoc in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge yesterday, where just 56 perfect brackets remain of the 4.8 million entries." I figure random selection on the part of all participants would have produced 1172 correct brackets.

So why is it OK for the very same people to so gleefully attack Obama ?

You've probably seen this kind of complaint before: the establishment of U.S. Constitution was done illegally under the Articles of Confederation. I will just give a brief sample from one web site : "Therefore the delegates had exceeded their instructions and were acting illegally." "The ratification procedure was patently illegal..." "Some say bribery and other illegal or at least immoral tactics were used to push the Constitution through." What few of these folks seem to make much of, though, is the fact that, per the previous constitution (you know, the one involving the king in parliament and all that), the Articles of Confederation were themselves pretty darned illegal, and seemed to be "pushed through" with a bunch of shooting.

"And we've got a Florida State at number nine in the West." A Florida State? Ugh.

Here . (Hat tip to Elizabeth Higgs.)

OK, in New York City, there are muggers, speeding taxis, electrified subway lines, drug shootings, crashing helicopters, bricks falling off of buildings, exploding man holes... and what are people all worked up about? Opossums ! "Brooklynites say city officials must take action to ensure the safety of residents." People, they're friggin' opossums! They weigh about ten pounds, don't eat humans, and when you bother them, they play dead. Get a grip, you bunch of marones.

In ESPN's story on West Virginia's Big East Championship victory, I read: "Mazzulla and Darryl Bryant both were suspended in the fall -- Bryant after a traffic incident and Mazzulla following a domestic assault outside of a bar." OK, how can something be both 'domestic' -- inside the home -- and occur 'outside of a bar'? Is Mazzulla's home just outside of a bar?

I was looking for my copy of Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg, and damned if every time I pinned down its location, it didn't shoot away at some indeterminate velocity!

Here : "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

The Pope, getting down with Eric Voegelin: "As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual landscape of today, only these two basic models seem to me to be up for discussion. The first I should like to call the Gnostic model, the other the Christian model. I see the common core of Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, as the repudiation of creation." —Joseph Ratzinger, “The Consequences of the Faith in Creation” (1979) (Hat tip to the Front Porch Republic .

The word is out on the street that former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is now a PR consultant to Tiger Woods. Fleischer is apparently telling Woods that if he only can start a war in some remote, Moslem country, his domestic troubles will be forgotten, at least for a few years.

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So, how's that buy-and-hold strategy working? Let's say you bought the NASDAQ when it stood at 5048.62, almost exactly ten years ago. Well, today it's at 2,340.68, down 54% -- or, inflation-adjusted, down an even worse 63%. So how long is the buy-and-hold strategy going to take to get back to even? Well, if you can earn a higher-than-average 6% per-year after inflation, it will take you around 17 years. That's 27 years under water.