Palin To Pursue *Schwing* Vote

"Why, Madam Vice President, with your glasses off and your hair down, you're..."

I think Palin is a great choice for McCain. Can't be attacked for inexperience when the Democrats have the same problem with their presidential choice. Palin's solid conservative positions force feminists to admit that they don't support women in politics per se, and will vote for an all-male ticket over a male/female ticket if the woman is not a socialist.

McCain just made the race extremely interesting. Noses around the country are no doubt being un-pinched as we speak.

A Handshake Away from Clark Rockefeller?

OK, so I'm watching Geraldo At Large and he's talking about how the erstwhile Christian Gerhartsreiter became Christopher Chichester and lived in San Marino with John and Linda Sohus. When they vanished, he told people that they were spies on a mission to Paris and even (allegedly) sent postcards in their names to people in the US from Paris as part of the coverup. Then he vanished to become Clark Rockefeller in Boston.

Geraldo waves around some postcards and we see images of them on the screen. One of them is clearly addressed to Lydia Marano at Dangerous Visions bookstore!

Apparently, according to the Boston Herald (Herald, Geraldo? Hmm...), Lydia said that  Linda Sohus worked at DV for 3 years then just one day never showed up again. Linda allegedly sent the postcard to Lydia from Paris. Lydia turned it over to cops in the hope that perhaps Gerhartsreiter's DNA might be on the stamp.

Eerie. Seeing Lydia's name on TV felt like being told that an acquaintance of yours is embroiled in an tangled web of murder and false identities. Wait... she is!

Shameless Capitalistic Promotion, Pt. 1

OK, I have to use this blog once in a while to tout what I've been doing. I've got a growing collection of really snarky, transgressional, anti-liberal bumper stickers, T-shirts, and miscellaneous stuff at Triplanetary Traders. To the left is an example. Click on it or on the link below and you'll be taken there at the speed of light!

Drill Our Way Out? Yes We Can! (Uses the positive attitude of liberals to attack one of their "No We Can't" rants.)

The Great Autograph Slaughter

Autograph hunting can be a deadly business...

I was responsible for two deaths in the Tolkien family, which led to the rumor that refusing an autograph request from me can be fatal. I had a copy of Smith of Wooten Major that I thought I'd send to Tolkien for an autograph. This was in 1971. Months passed and I received the book back with a note from his agent saying that Mr. Tolkien was not signing anything right now because his wife had just passed away. I understood. So I waited a year or so, and then sent the book to him again. This time it came back with a note from his agent regretfully informing me that the book was being returned unsigned because Mr. Tolkien had, sadly, passed away.

Yikes! That's one book I'm wrapping in lead and never sending anywhere again.

Something similar happened to me and Rod Serling. I met him at a speech he gave at West Valley College in the 1973 or '74 (where I also first met Ray Bradbury, Buckminster Fuller, and Arthur C. Clarke!). I asked him for an autograph and he said in that great voice of his, "I'm sorry, I don't sign autographs."

A year or so later.... dead.

So it's unwise to refuse me an autograph or even to tarry in responding to the request....

The Plame Truth

I just heard Bill Handel's interview with Valerie Plame in which she touts her new novel-- er, biography -- and claims that "99% of what the CIA redacted" from her book "had nothing to do with national security."

Gee, I thought everything she did was super-secret spy stuff. Could it logically follow that just maybe her ultra-clandestine mega-spy desk-jockey identity in reality actually "had nothing to do with national security"? 

Move a Mountain? Start With a Seed...

OK, however you may feel about religion, someone has come up with an Internet test of faith: mustardseedchallenge.com. A webcam is trained on a mustard seed and the goal is -- by faith alone -- to move the mustard seed from the left side to the right.

I am assuming this is a sincere experiment and that the seed is not glued down...

Hey, Geroge Noory, time to get your remote viewers and psychokinetic experts in there to nudge it!

Remember Heinlein's observation: 

"If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! [Expanded Universe]