Idiot on the loose alert!
Ha'aretz reports Gerda Duisenberg visits E. J'lem, says Israel committing terror:

Gerda Duisenberg, the wife of European Central Bank President Wim Duisenberg, said during a visit Sunday to East Jerualem that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was provoking the Palestinians and that his government was guilty of committing terror attacks.

Duisenberg made the comments just three hours before two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in south Tel Aviv, killing 22 people.

Open mouth, insert boot.

Every time there is a break in the violence, Sharon creates a provocation, she said.

One can't help but wonder what sort of cachet Gerda has besides marrying Wim.

In April, Duisenberg caused a storm in Holland when she draped a PLO flag from the balcony of her Amsterdam home and founded a group calling on Israel to withdraw from the territories. In November, she cancelled a planned trip to the territories, under pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which said that it considered her persona non grata.

Prior to the cancelled November trip Duisenberg said that she would meet with Israelis, but she has reversed that decision with regard to the present visit, and has even refused to stay in an Israeli hotel. She said Israelis could come to Holland to meet her.

I get it. She left a job in the Dutch space program to marry a banker and become Queen. Sad.

Shock Jock Alert!
And The joke's on President Chávez:

It was a practical joke that may have worked too well: Two Miami radio-show hosts known for playing outrageous pranks on the air got Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on a private line this morning by pretending that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was calling him from Havana.

''We still can't believe it,'' said Enrique Santos, co-host of El Vacilón de la Mañana, (The Morning Joker), on WXDJ-FM El Zol 95.7, a Spanish-language salsa station. ``He fell for it.''

The station owner didn't, though, and the DJs were waiting today to find out what would happen.

The joke was part of a segment called Fidel Te Llama or ''Fidel's Calling You,'' in which Santos and his co-host, Joe Ferrero, call various people and play snippets of a controversial conversation between Castro and Mexican President Vicente Fox that Castro made public in 2001.

Hearing Castro's distinctive rasp, the unsuspecting recipients of the call usually believe it is the comandante himself on the phone. After a few minutes of a disjointed conversation in which the same nonsensical sentence fragments are repeated, the victims get suspicious.

Santos and Ferrero then drop the bombshell that it is a Miami radio station calling.

On Monday, Chávez, who counts Castro as his strongest ally and unabashedly touts Cuba's Communist system as a role model, fell victim to El Vacilón.

To do it right, they need an impressionist to do Fidel. Does Rich Little speak Spanish?

"Cool, Orcs!"
(Via Andrew Sullivan) Jonah Goldberg reviews the reviewers:

Sigh. Okay, yes, it's true. Many of the Orcs (and the super-Orcs) are dark-skinned and have slant-eyes. They are also - how shall I put this? - Orcs! Ya frickin' idjit!

One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people - like me - who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, "Cool, Orcs!" On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt, who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim "black people!" Maybe he should spend less time vetting movies for signs of racism and more time vetting himself if, that is, he free-associates black people with these subhuman monsters.

Perhaps Mr. Yatt could be placated by a new villain?

You can't make this stuff up
Bill Quick finds a gem:

If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.

My Desk Explained
(Via The Corner) - The Economist defends me with In praise of clutter. Best anecdote:

The most dramatic of these experiments took place at the offices of Chiat/Day, an American advertising agency. In 1993, Jay Chiat, the boss, had a revelation while on the ski slopes, and realised that his employees' minds were trapped by the boxes they were working in. Free their bodies from the box and you would free their minds. They were, accordingly, installed in offices without desks or filing cabinets. There were sofas to sit on and a few special rooms for meetings. There was nowhere to keep any paper; indeed, nobody was supposed to keep paper.

Chiat/Day's employees behaved like any group of refugees torn from familiar surroundings. They tried to rebuild their world. One woman bought a child's red wagon, put her paper files in it and trailed it around the corridors after her. Most people recreated their desks in the boots of their cars, where they stored their files and notebooks, dashing in and out of the building to the parking lot during meetings. Groups of workers took permanent control of meeting rooms and a shanty-town of desks grew up. The company was eventually bought by a traditionalist rival and normal life resumed.

No desks? Beware of epiphanies that come to you on the ski slopes.

Mooning Myn Get in the Act Alert!
First it was the Marin womyn, now it's NAKED MEN, MEN OF PEACE

On December 21,2002, near Gainesville, Florida, 22 men posed naked to send a stunning Peace message to the American people and the war administration. Braving the cold, these men from Fort Myers to Gainesville, gathered together on a hillside to do the unthinkable: To Bare it all for Peace.

Zzzzz. It would have been better if they stood on their heads. No film at 11.

All Tuckered Out Alert!
Steve's back and has tales of the Western Desert:

I'm still too tired to write about it, but I can mention a few things before putting my head between my knees and reaching for more Tums. We stayed at the Mirage, in a room where mini-bar Cokes cost $3.75, but you can walk fifty feet to a vending machine and buy the same thing for a mere $2.50. We gambled for a total of 20 minutes, possibly due to the fact that my amazing three-digit IQ constantly reminds me that gambling is for idiots. On New Year's Eve, I had about seventy mai tais and charmed both halves of a nice lesbian couple, and I recall trying to teach one of them to merengue.

The way it used to work
Gareth Parker has an interesting reaction from some co-workers to the Australian illegal alien riots. That's the way it used to work in the USA too until the professional diversifiers arrived on the scene. The good professor had more on the Australian experience recently.

Today's Hoot
(Via Whacking Day) Charles Krauthammer reveals The Pariah Chess Club:

Oh, yes, the club's name. Of the four founding members, two were social scientists who, at the time we started playing, had just written books that had made their college lecture tours rather physically hazardous. I too sported a respectable enemies list (it was the heady Clinton years). And we figured that the fourth member, a music critic and perfectly well-liked, could be grandfathered in as a pariah because of his association with the three of us.

Pariah status has not been required of subsequent members, though it is encouraged. Being a chess player already makes you suspect enough in polite society, and not without reason. Any endeavor that has given the world Paul Morphy, the first American champion, who spent the last 17-odd years of his life wandering the streets of New Orleans, and Bobby Fischer, the last American champion, now descended John Nash-like into raving paranoia, cannot be expected to be a boon to one's social status.

Our friends think us odd. They can understand poker night or bridge night. They're not sure about chess. When I tell friends that three of us once drove from Washington to New York to see Garry Kasparov play a game, it elicits a look as uncomprehending as if we had driven 200 miles for an egg-eating contest.

Streaking for Saddam Alert!
The Marin womyn without pants are back. Over at Shark Blog we are enthralled to find:

The Marin County Naked Women plan to march naked down Market Street in San Francisco on Jan. 18 to express solidarity with Saddam Hussein. And I plan to be there for the parade. I'm contemplating going naked except for a Saddam mask and holding a sign that says "Thanks for your support". And in any event I'll be taking pictures. Lots of pictures.

Lots of new wingnuttery in the article on the upcoming goose bump parade including

"One hundred thousand women and men will strip on Jan. 18 in Washington D.C. and San Francisco for the huge national peace march in protest of the stripping of constitutional rights by a government intent on war," said Donna Sheehan, founder of Unreasonable Women Baring Witness in Point Reyes Station.

"Our message to women all over the world is be bold, be courageous, be vulnerable for peace."

Be delusional for dangerous dictators.