The Onion creeps closer to reality with its headlines today, including North Korea Wondering What It Has to Do to Attract U.S. Military Attention and this brief item:
Saddam Enrages Bush With Full ComplianceIn other deeply silly news, Instapundit isn't sure Osama really made the latest tape but is convinced by his urging of Iraqis and other Muslims to rise against the US that there is a significant connection between al-Qa'ida and Saddam. He, of course, ignores the part of the faceless recording in which the speaker urges Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam.
WASHINGTON, DC—President Bush expressed frustration and anger Monday over a U.N. report stating that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is now fully complying with weapons inspections. "Enough is enough," a determined Bush told reporters. "We are not fooled by Saddam's devious attempts to sway world opinion by doing everything the U.N. asked him to do. We will not be intimidated into backing down and, if we have any say in the matter, neither will Saddam." Bush added that any further Iraqi attempt to meet the demands of the U.N. or U.S. will be regarded as "an act of war.
He also apparently considers Michael Lerner (of Tikkun) to be deeply silly because he sometimes has to urinate. This clearly discredits the peace movement, whatever that is.
categories: memewatch
4:35:01 PM 
say what []
Looks like I jumped to conclusions. The news appears to be that Kerry will have surgery for prostate cancer, not that he will be dropping out of the race. When TPM posted that this news would "shake up" the race, I mistakenly assumed this meant a reshuffling of the candiates. My bad. Best wishes to Kerry in undergoing this becoming-more-routine medical treatment.
categories: x-syndicate
1:18:57 PM say what []
TPM hints that a prospective Democratic presidential candidate is about to drop out of the race for health reasons.
categories: x-syndicate
12:18:58 PM say what []
For years I've been bugging my friends about an untenable, unmarketable, too-expensive-to-produce idea for a dynamic atlas.
I've always been a huge fan of historical atlases, those books that show not just where the borders and populations are now but where they used to be and how they've changed.
What I like about the idea of a dynamic atlas is that you could layer a number of different groupings over the same base map: political boundaries, religious communities, language groups, ethnic migrations, elites vs. peasants, etc.
Wind them up and watch them spread, flow, retreat, consume, vanish. Things like that could be set to run automatically or work with some kind of slider so that the reader could control the rate of change displayed. I've imagined this would require a database schema, a lot of data, and a playback medium such as CD-ROM (which shows you approximately when this idea was gelling for me).
None of my friends in the multimedia publishing business, even those involved in developing reference materials, ever felt that this was a viabile commercial idea.
So I am greatly pleased to stumble upon Animated Atlas: Growth of a Nation, a Flash based illustration of U.S. history in North America, suitable for classroom discussions and casual fans of geography.
Thanks to Andrew Northrup (aka The Poor Man) for spotting this site. His take on it? "Thrill to the sight of Andrew Jackson's disembodied head repelling the British from Nawlins in the war of 1812. It would repel me, too."
categories: x-syndicate
10:18:03 AM say what []
