The Hunt for Hallmark Ornaments

So it's December 26, 2003.

Earlier today, I went to the local Hallmark shop in order to pick up some ornaments that had been deemed desirable but not at full price. It's regional policy of the Hallmark stores around here to cut prices on their Christmas ornaments by 50% in the day or so after 25 December, and I was going to take advantage of that.

This is what you call a cost control measure, despite the fact that Mom's winter purchases from Hallmark has to underwrite their fourth-quarter profits at some level. I have yet to figure out how to get Hallmark's board of directors to cut us in on the action in terms of dividends. I haven't looked, but they're reportedly a privately-held company, so buying stock or asking for options thereupon doesn't seem to be an option.

To get to where I'm going, here's an observation: You take your own life into your hands when you go to one of these sales and stand between women and bargains. I'm there trying to find a Bugs Bunny in a metal plane from the 1920s. These women are there to get their fourth and fifth example of Super-Duper Snowflake Barbie and so forth. These women are vicious. They take no prisoners and elbows can fly. About the only thing I can liken it to is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Names of ornaments are called out and occasionally they're handed back. I usually do some of this, because I've got longer arms than the average participant in this melee, and because I've got a nice pair of sharp elbows. As awful as that sounds, these things are useful when dealing with the enraged horde of Hallmark shoppers.

Anyways, after about two hours of work, we managed to procure all but three of the ornaments desired. A quick tour around the other area stores delivered that which we were looking for, and so our ornament quest for 2003 is over.

Mr. Chairman of the Board, Mr. President of the United States, you're welcome for our stimulus of the national economy. I'll be expecting my dividend check in the mail.

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Come See What Santa Brought!

Hooray. Although I had previously bought myself the best Christmas present I got this year (i.e. the complete first season of Battlestar Galactica) I did manage to get several things of note:

-The Adventures of Indiana Jones, widescreen edition. Woo hoo. Marian Ravenwood and Elsa Schneider, archeological babes of note. Unfortunately, either the sound mix on Raiders of the Lost Ark is bad or the settings on the family home theater system are bungled, because I can't hear the dialogue all that well.

-Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century by Bernard Ireland and illustrated by Tony Gibbons. This book, although a little on the slim side, is splendid for a quick-reference book on the subject. It's also got short essays on other battleship-related topics, like the loss of Repulse and Prince of Wales to Imperial Japanese aircraft three days after the successful IJN strike against Pearl Harbor. It's also got a color illustration of what a Montana-class battleship would have looked like had we ever finished one. Heh heh heh, these things just scream evil.

-Iowa Class Battleships - Their Design, Weapons & Equipment by Robert F. Sumrall. This is an older book, published by the United States Naval Institute in 1988. I've got the British edition of the book, printed by Conway Maritime Press, which adds to the cool of this tome. It's more than I ever wanted to know about the mighty Iowa-class battleships, and is a splendid reference for these last battlewagons for America's navy.

As you can see, I'm kind of fond of battleships. Suffice it to say that when I stand on the decks of USS North Carolina or USS Wisconsin, I'm prone to getting a big grin on my face as I wander these monsters from out of time. It's almost creepy seeing them, because nothing we've built since then carries the same visual menace as a battleship. John Lehman understood that, which is one reason we brought them back in the 1980s. The Soviet Union understood visual menace, and thus built the hulking Kirov-class atomic-powered missile-armed battlecruisers. Sure, aircraft carriers are wickedly destructive in their own right, but nothing says "Reach out and annihilate someone" like a shower of 16" shells being fired from 20 miles away. Heh heh heh. You can't look at a picture of an Iowa broadside without getting the big Calvin grin on your face.

Anyways, the relatives are over, so I'll hush now and get back to them.

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Christmas Eve, Sort Of

Hrrm. Like everything else since I've gotten home from school, this is posted many days out of sequence. The entire Christmas season post-exams has been a blur.

Anyways, I had a nifty rah-rah Christmas message all composed and then I lost it in a browser crash. So therefore, a reconstructed, pared down message:

Merry Christmas. Peace on Earth, good will to men. To our folks overseas, I want y'all home as soon as possible. Be careful out there, as that sergeant on Hill Street Blues used to say.

Now, for something that (hopefully some will interpret positively: I went to my church's Christmas Eve candlelight service and got shanghaied into performing as a communion steward. I hate doing it, because you have to repeat a single phrase (in my case, "The body of Christ, broken for you") over and over, and because you've got to do everything right for each man, woman, and child who comes in front of you. Moreover, I had to work with bread. For reasons of sanitary concern, we wear these gloves, but my hands were too big for the things, and so I basically got to pluck chunks of bread out with these gloves on. The downside of that was that I had a pair of semi-rigid tongs since I couldn't move my fingers, so I managed to crush a lot of bread and make more of a mess than anyone else.

However, I do like, for some reason, dealing with the children whose parents bring them forward. They're usually short enough to where I've got to squat down and hand them their bread. It's a different thing than handing an anonymous adult a piece of badly-torn bread, and the kid's usually looking at you with big wide eyes. I don't know exactly how this gets through the either stoic or downright daffy persona I usually project, but it kind of warms the heart.

Enh. Now that I've done my Scrooge reformed thing for the day, time to warm up the Nike Hercules site and arm the W-31 warhead; I'm going to get that red intruder from the North if it's the last thing he ever does. That'll teach him to invade my airspace and not leave me what I asked for...

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Orson Scott Card, Meet Margaret Thatcher

North Carolina-based (I believe) author Orson Scott Card had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, and it threw a couple of rhetorical bombs at his fellow Democrats. I thought it was a good column, from what appears to be a good man.¹

Some choice cuts:

[T]heir platforms range from Howard Dean's "Bush is the devil" to everybody else's "I'll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil." Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.

I've often wondered something along that line m'self. Given that Clinton spent eight years hauling directly to the middle of wherever everyone else wanted to go (and seemingly regardless of the merit of any one position in any particular debate) you'd think the professional electoratsia in the Democratic National Committee would know how poorly superheated firebrand rhetoric plays. Lord knows they reminded our people time and time again of that.

The more I think about it, there must be some connection between this firebrand mentality and what appears to be more of a focus in base energizing and mobilization in current electoral politics (i.e. telling them what they want to hear; preaching to the choir) instead of doing what President Nixon might suggest, namely leadership in saying "This is where I am. I am right. Follow me." Of course, President Nixon also said that Republicans were to run to the right in the primaries and back towards the center in the general election; for all I know, Dean's people are holding that up to a mirror and reading it 'run left' and 'to the center'.

Anyways. Maybe I don't see a lot of this because I just don't care about Governor Dean. He's a novice and probably has the Federal-level governing ability implied by that. I'm personally still waiting for Joe Lieberman or perhaps John Edwards and Richard Gephardt to take off, and put adults back in charge of the Democratic Party. I don't want the Democrats marginalized as a party, primarily because I don't know who's most likely to take their place, and I don't like uncertainty at this level. Similarly, they force Republicans and conservatives to keep the intellectual power plants at full load. That's good for us and that's good for America.

There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.

Mr. Card, if you love your party, you might not want to wait until after this election. Although I certainly don't think sanity's going down without a fight in the Democrats, these Dean people are, to steal a phrase from Smith, like a virus. As one recent article on Doc Strange put it, "When most candidates commit gaffes, the money dries up. When Howard Dean commits a gaffe, the money comes flowing in."

This leads me to another point: Does the FEC have adequate oversight of these web-based donations? Several of us at the school were trying to figure this out, and we don't know where the law is on donations of that kind. Between the Clark and Dean types who'd post saying "I just gave $x to Wesley/Howard!!" and list their donation numbers, I'm almost convinced that election-cycle donation limits are being reached somewhere.

Next up, a nasty slap at Reuters, who usually deserves it:

Reuters recently ran a feature that trumpeted the "fact" that U.S. casualties in Iraq have now surpassed U.S. casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam War. Never mind that this is a specious distortion of the facts, which depends on the ignorance of American readers. The fact is that during the first three years of the war in Vietnam, dating from the official "beginning" of the war in 1961, American casualties were low because (a) we had fewer than 20,000 soldiers there, (b) most of them were advisers, deliberately trying to avoid a direct combat role, (c) our few combat troops were special forces, who generally get to pick and choose the time and place of their combat, and (d) because our presence was so much smaller, there were fewer American targets than in Iraq today.

Harrumph! Mr. Card, you've forgotten the primary rule of Reuters: Never let little inconvenient things like facts (e.g. what you've illustrated that counterpoint with) stand in the way of an ideological (probably trans-national or at the very least pro-European Community) bias. You got that? Now we see why you're just a (pretty prolific, good, and awarded) writer of books and are not a member of the Fourth Estate. Tsk tsk!

The old SSI wargame Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic used to have an animated officer to report hits on enemy vessels. If that little dude were here, he'd say "PENETRATING HIT, 16", TO GOOD SHIP LIBERALPOP". Mr. Card lands a bunch of large caliber hits on the whole "I'm not unpatriotic for calling Bush the equivalent of Hitler or for wanting Saddam Hussein to win" crowd:

Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil.

Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.

Patriots like Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 when General George Catlett Marshall asked him to basically throw the election in order to preserve an American cryptographic advantage. I'd like to believe that I would have made Dewey's choice, but there are times when I get the feeling that a lot of politicians today wouldn't be real men such as Dewey. Or Marshall, for that matter. (NB, Wesley Clark: You would rise in my estimation if I thought you capable of standing within sight of Marshall or any other of our World War II leaders (even Admiral King) without being required by objective fairness to scream "Unworthy" while ducking your head if they drew near.)

I would not have chosen Afghanistan and Iraq to start with; Syria, Iran, Sudan and Libya were much more culpable and militarily more important to neutralize as sponsors of terror. (They say that Libya and Sudan have changed their tune lately, but I have my doubts.)

I don't necessarily agree with the first part of this sentence. After 11 September 2001, it was politically necessary to strike directly at al-Qaeda, and in a dramatic fashion that said "America chooses to slaughter her attackers". I understand and concede---in fact I agree---that targets of military importance ought to be struck, but we had to go and ring Osama bin Laden's bell, whether or not that helped the overall war effort. War is one of those complex things with public relations, political, and military components that often may not make immediate obvious sense. I believe that Mr. Card's statements miss the mark here. Striking the Sudanese may be necessary (and I think a good idea for what I keep hearing about their pro-slavery and anti-Christian policies), but it wouldn't have made a lot of sense in terms of getting revenge for the immediate 11 September attacks. The point is, however, moot in that we've already gone to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Card turns from noting the need for political unity in order to achieve victory and to the politico-media front, and after some ruminations, produces this gem:

And in all the campaign rhetoric, I keep looking, as a Democrat, for a single candidate who is actually offering a significant improvement over the Republican policies that in fact don't work, while supporting or improving upon the American policies that will help make us and our children secure against terrorists.

Well, I may disagree on several things with OSC in terms of domestic or even foreign policy, but at the same time, he appears to be what Margaret Thatcher once said of M.S. Gorbachev, "a man with whom we can do business". I don't expect everyone in this country to agree with me---since I'm human and automatically capable of error, this is a good thing---but I also don't have time for the types who foam at the mouth and who can't accept reasonable disagreement. That kind of behavior pretty much in my book cuts the foamer out of reasonable debate. Of course, this also has the effect of cutting many in the loudmouth wing---i.e. the Dean "Democratic" wing---of the Democratic Party out of the people whose input I'll listen to. So be it. One can only hope that the adults take control of the Democratic machine soon; much more of MoveOn and the Dean camp, and something will have to arise to take its place. That's not a good thing.

I am glad I've been reading Card since the last Gulf war; it seems that he's not only a good writer, but a good thinker.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Kevin Patrick at Blogs for Bush.

¹ Yes, that's right, I said that a Democrat was a good man. I'm from the rural South and I've been raised to speak well of good people, regardless of party affiliation.

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A Patriotic Rock

Found on a MUSH, somewhere across the Internet: Some chap in Iowa has painted a patriotically appropriate tableau on a rock. It's got various quotes from history on it, and seems like one of those spontaneous expressions of patriotism that pop up where people love their land. If I were to wax poetic, I'd say it was the manifestation of that which is the deep regard of a free man for his land and those who help protect his freedom.

I don't have a whole lot more to say about it, so go on over and check out On a Rock in Rural Iowa.

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Rich Lowry, 'Buckley Brat'

As tipped off by Mr. Lowry himself, there's an article detailing a little bit about his background and the process surrounding his latest book, an indictment of President Clinton for misadministration of the country. (No, this isn't going to be one of those Corner book bleg things.) Although Mr. Lowry had the good sense to go to a school in Virginia, he chose one of the public universities and thus had to swelter in Charlottesville.

Nevertheless, I've always been a little suspicious of Rich, and he finally gives me solid reasons to support that suspicion:

Growing up in Arlington, Va., Mr. Lowry was "rambunctious" and "always dirty and sweaty," more contrarian than troublemaker: When everyone was going on about Star Wars, he didn’t join the herd.

Not only did he got to the University of Virginia, but he grew up in Northern Virginia (more like occupied territory; sooner or later we've got to force the Washington D.C. occupation army out of there...) and didn't like Star Wars.

Lowry, surrender your card in the conservative pantheon right there, bub. Going to U.Va. and growing up in NOVA can be forgiven under the right circumstances (working for the Virginia Advocate goes a long way) but not being a Lucas fan in the 1970s is unforgivable.

Hee hee. For another article on or about Mr. Lowry's latest exploits, (but from a suspect source) see here.

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An Ivy League Bleg

OK, so I'm checking my e-mail, and I find that a Harvard student's got a request for conservative bloggers with a hankering for poll taking: He's in a class full of liberals (At Harvard? Who'da thunk it? --Ed.) and he needs some help showing that people approve of Adam marrying Eve, not Adam marrying Steve. Mr. Barrett wants to see "the Establishment"¹ pass the proverbial brick, and your humble correspondent (Hey now! We can't tell obvious lies in print! Cut that out. --Ed.) concurs, in his own Hunter S. Thompson fight-the-power way.

So here's the action y'all can take: Click here to see his post on the subject, and here to vote in the poll. The Country Pundit is recommending a vote for the third option, so have at it.

This is merely a prank to be used against Ivy League schools, and to shock the kinds of people who want universities to divest themselves of Israeli holdings since the Israelis have this nasty habit of standing up for themselves against Islamist terror. Hee hee.

¹ Once upon a time, that was supposed to be us, wasn't it?

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Wal-Mart v. Art

This is strange:

The Oconee County [Georgia] Wal-Mart was under siege Friday night by a guerrilla performance art project staged by University students for their Studio Art 2810 final.

While I enjoy hearing about problems that befall Wal-Mart, I'm also slightly wishing that someone had fallen while running away from the store or something. This appears to have been some sort of group effort in order to get a grade. The teacher ought to flunk the lot of them for being inane, but that would probably require a showing of academic courage and resolve.¹

Another choice tidbit:

"Our one guideline was to not break any laws, because the intended purpose was that we didn't want to break any laws but we wanted new (policies) to have to be made," Kubie said. "I think we were pretty responsible in the way we executed our overall plan. There was no permanent damage and very little cleaning to be done."

Son, let me explain something to you: Performance art disruptions don't force new policies, other than to cause more trouble for people within your demographic. All you've done is irritate a Wal-Mart manager. You say that there's no permanent damage? How noble! Some poor employee's going to have to clean up after you, and all he's going to think about is how much he hates you. These little punks ought to be assessed the costs of cleaning whatever "temporary" damage was done. Good grief.

I wish my undergraduate days had been this easy. I suppose I was too busy trying to figure out just what the difference was between the various formulations of the categorical imperative, Mill v. Bentham, and lots of other high-brow crap that's been absolutely useless once I got clear of the presidential handshake on graduation day. Oh well.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to DiVERSiONZ.

¹ Perhaps if they'd gone to the local mosque and protested Islamist terror, then we'd see some outrage in academia. Of course, it probably wouldn't matter because the mosque's staffers probably would have wasted the students, being the religion of peace and all.

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Mrs. Claus, Part Deux

I have arrived: James Lileks and I were thinking about the same thing after watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I am of course filing suit for anger infringement.

Sayeth Lileks:

I also don't think Mrs. Claus should be played by Heidi Klum in a white-fur thong, stroked by buff oiled-up elves. Think of the children, I say. Think of the children.

The weird sound you hear is the laugh track of the two protagonists from Beavis and Butt-head, MTV's last gasp of socio-cultural relevance. Huh huh huh...cool. Mr. Lileks, I agree with Mister Green in saying that you're wrong. I, like Mister Green, couldn't find much complaint with a fur-clad Klum as Mrs. Claus, so long as I'm the Mr. Otherwise, of course, this is absolutely shocking and shouldn't even be conceived much less blogged about.¹

However, if Heidi Klum wanted to audition for the part, there'd be no objections from me. No objections whatsoever, your honor.

To close, the only acceptable Mrs. Claus that I've seen was on film was Elizabeth Mitchell's Carol Newman in Tim Allen's The Santa Clause 2. She was a babe, right up until the CGI got ahold of her. It's unfortunate that her latest series got cancelled/put on hiatus, but maybe she'll turn up elsewhere, preferably not in Kerry Weaver's shower.

¹ This is to be read with the manner, accent, and style of John Cleese, preferably in Fawlty Towers appearance.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Mister Green for the story.

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