I am receiving a great deal of peer pressure to become involved with this “Second Life” phenomenon, which Tim described to me as much like WoW but without the +12 longsword of dork and more artsy people. How many of you are involved in this mess, and why would it interest me?
Archives for August 2007
Open Thread
Separated At Birth?
A Disgrace
Not a national one. A regional disgrace, and this hits right in the gut:
The name and the character may take some getting used to. But move over Stevie Steeler and The Terrible Fan: The mascot named yesterday as part of the 75th anniversary season of the Steelers is … Steely McBeam.
No. It won’t, because I will refuse to get used to it. As a matter of fact, after this post, I will refuse to acknowledge it.
Here is a picture of the disgrace:
I have always been proud of the fact that we don’t have cheerleaders (maybe because the thought of South Side girls in short skirts and revealing tops terrifies most sane people), and this just is stupid and unnecessary. We don’t need a mascot. We have a football team. We have Yuengling. We have Imp and Iron. We have Primanti’s and Kielbassa and 5 Superbowl Trophies and Myron Cope and Tunch Ilkin and the Terrible Towel and Mean Joe Greene and the Steel Curtain and the Immaculate Reception and we don’t need a stupid mascot.
Ever.
*** Update ***
Here is the URL for the Steelers front office contact info. Give them a piece of your mind.
My email:
I really can not tell you how much I dislike this idiotic mascot, but here is a start:
Please quietly kill this embarrassment, and I promise you we will all pretend it never happened.
John Cole
I think this was my first bit of web activism.
The Crash?
Something that should get your attention:
Stocks dropped sharply as soon as trading opened today after a French bank, BNP Paribas, suspended operations of three of its funds in the wake of turmoil in the American market for home loans and the European Central Bank injected cash into the financial system because of tightening credit markets.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 200 points, or 1.5 percent, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq composite index were down just as much. Shortly after 10 a.m., the Nasdaq had recovered much of its losses but the Dow remained down about 170 points.
The plunge came after a sell-off in Europe, which was prompted after BNP, the largest publicly traded bank in France, became the latest European lender to announce problems linked to the worsening credit market in the United States, where several large companies have already announced losses.
A German central bank meeting was under way to discuss details of a rescue package for the lender IKB, another victim of exposure to the crisis in subprime lending.
Jonathan Mullen, a spokesman for BNP, said that the credit squeeze in the United States had made it impossible to calculate the value of the underlying assets of the funds and that the bank was obliged by market conditions to halt holders of the funds from cashing out or new investors from buying shares in the funds.
Keep your eye on this.
Military Justice?
This makes no sense:
A general at Camp Pendleton has cut short the sentences of two Marines imprisoned in the Hamdaniya murder case and might do the same for two others.
Pvts. Tyler Jackson and Jerry Shumate Jr. were released Monday by order of Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. The base announced Mattis’ decision a day later.
Jackson and Shumate had been sentenced to 21 months in the brig as part of pretrial deals in which they pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and conspiracy to obstruct justice. They were demoted in rank from corporal to private.
In exchange, government officials dropped the charge of premeditated murder. A conviction on that count would have sent the defendants to prison for the rest of their lives, with no possibility of parole.
***Jackson, Shumate, five other Marines and a Navy corpsman kidnapped and killed a man in Hamdaniya, Iraq, on April 26, 2006. They snatched the victim from his bed, took him to a roadside hole, bound him and killed him with a barrage of bullets.
Afterward, the squad tried to disguise the killing as a firefight between U.S. troops and an insurgent trying to plant a bomb.
The defendants said they partly wanted to send a message that insurgents and their supporters in Hamdaniya would pay a dear price. They had become frustrated after repeatedly arresting a suspect and turning him over to Iraqi authorities, only to see him released every time.
If a few months in the brig is the punishment for kidnapping, murder, and an attempted coverup, by my calculation, Beauchamp’s punishment for penning essays should be a blowjob, a bucket of KFC, and a twelve-pack, followed by monthly massages from a topless model (think of it as probation).
Hearts and minds, yo!
Seriously- am I missing something pretty major here, or is this as outrageous as it seems?
Open Thread
Because there is nothing that interests me at the moment.
*** Update ***
Not true- this headline at Drudge made me laugh:
“Minorities Now Form Majority in One-Third of Most-Populous Counties”