Silflay Hraka

Leporidae Family Unity

Another bunny in favor of moral imperialism

Interesting Read

Practice to Deceive: Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

Speaking of Pictures You Don’t See On TV

Warning: The links below are extremely volatile, as each time the Herald Sun adds or a deletes a picture from the slideshow the url of all the pictures changes. Idiots. Next time I’ll just take the damn things.

Hopefully the overall slideshow address will remain the same. You can see it here.

Lt. Mark Day, Petty Officer Thomas Wagers, Cmdr. Robert Hinks, Lt. Cmdr. John Uecker, and Capt. John Perciballi work on an unidentifed, 2-year-old Iraqi boy, at Camp Viper, in southern Iraq on Wednesday.

U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Marcco Ware, from Los Angeles, carries an injured Iraqi soldier who was shot three times during an attempted ambush of the 3rd Battalion, Fifth Regiment, convoy Tuesday morning in central Iraq.

A young boy is all smiles after receiving water from US and British Civil Affairs troops in Umm Qsar, Iraq

A U.S. Marine helps an injured POW moments after securing the port of Um Qusar in southern Iraq,

via The Daily Pundit, who has this one:

Wish I knew what the original caption was.

Sarah Hughes, skating to the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” brought the house down last night at the World Figure Skating Championships in Washington with her moving and unexpected tribute to Robert’s Capa’s unknown Spanish Republican.

Hughes’ coach and choreographer, Robin Wagner, stated that the move had been decided on at the last minute, as a tribute to the coalition forces in Iraq as well as a warning to the American public of the potential costs involved in a campaign there.

“We didn’t inform the judges about the new move until after she skated her program.” Wagner told reporters afterwards. “Sarah and I felt that in order to appreciate the full artistic impact of the collapse, the judges would need to feel the same shock and surprise that Capa did when he snapped his famous photo.”

After being informed of the program change, the judges enthusiastically agreed with Ms. Wagner, giving Sarah near perfect marks for both Technical and Artistic merit.

The only dissent in the judging ranks came from the French judge, Dominique de Villepin, who stated that he had lowered Ms. Hughes’ technical mark for a “lack of realism in the death portrayal.”

“If you study the move closely,” said M. de Villepin, “You clearly see that Sarah is falling backwards. In all my years as a member of the French armed forces, I never witnessed one of our soldiers fall in this manner after being struck by a bullet. My comrades invariably fell forwards when shot by the enemy, in the direction they were running rather than back towards the enemy.”

He further theorized that Capa’s Republican had not been shot at all, but was perhaps instead stretching out prior to a late afternoon nap.

At a late afternoon news conference, Ms. Hughes dismissed M. de Villepin’s remarks as “Nothing twenty dollars couldn’t fix.” Both she and Ms. Wagner stated that the “Republican Death Jete’”, as they have come to call it, may or may not be performed as part of the upcoming long program.

“To inform the audience in advance of the move or moves would ruin their artistic impact should we choose to perform them,” stated Ms. Wagner, “And we have worked too hard perfecting the Death Jete’ to do that. It must come as a complete surprise to everyone in the building, as it did to the subject of Mr. Capa’s photograph.”

In response to the overwhelming enthusiasm for the Death Jete’, Michelle Kwan has hinted that she may also unveil a new move, tentatively entitled “Trout on Riverbank”, during her long program.

I don’t have the words…

I don’t make the claim that all of these photos are genuine but, if they are, may God have mercy on us all.

Editor’s Note: The “us” in that statement is meant to be a general humanity “us” and not an American “us”.

What’s That Burned Smell?

If you really want to shake a child’s worldview, arrange for the picture tube on the big-screen to blow while she’s watching the Aristocats.

Commenting Iffy

From Haloscan:

We’re currently experiencing an extremely high amount of traffic because of a couple war and politics-related weblogs that use our commenting system that have skyrocketed in traffic because of the war. So at peak hours, the site may respond slower than usual because of the high server load.

As if we didn’t already know

Comments by General Tommy Franks indicate that the U.S. may have been planning to go to war months before approaching the U.N. and no matter the outcome of weapons inspections. Comes as no surprise, really.

I’ve Been Slimed

Not getting much at all done today. Ngnat is sick, so I’m staying home with her. She’s not very sick, having just enough of a stomach flu to keep her out of daycare, so she’s been fairly active. Hasn’t really eaten anything, though. The sainted wife wants to take her to Bluefield this weekend to see the great-grandparents while I’m off fishing; she’s hoping a day of rest will help Ngnat’s system fight off the bug before then.

Right now we’re sitting in the Lazy Boy downstairs. She’s drinking juice and watching The Iron Giant. I’m taking care of work issues on the laptop as they come up, typing one-handed. Occasionally she leans over and sneezes directly onto the keys.

It’s a hard knock life.

When she’s not sneezing, she’s demanding juice, or cutting up Bongo comics with her safety scissors, or helping me type, which is quite the adventure when I’m editing the Apache config file for the campus webservers. I’ve not been able to pay attention to much of anything for more than three or four minutes at a time, so it’s a good thing most of the work tasks haven’t called for any deep thought.

I wanted to say something about Shelley Pokorney, whose husband was one the N.C. based Marines who died when Iraqi soldiers first faked surrender and then fired on them, but the only thing that I can think of during the staccato intervals of peace that Ngnat is allowing me is Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 letter to Mrs. Bixby

Dear Madam,

Abraham Lincoln

Shelley Pokorney’s loss, and that of the other N.C. Marine families is less than Mrs. Bixby’s in number only. One or five or twenty, it’s still a tragedy.