Category Archives: North Korea

Hot Air

Hores Sense

Happy National Grammar Day, everyone! Watch your colons.

In trying to learn about NGD, I came upon a neat little organization and its blog, both of which, sadly, no longer exist. Why? Well, prob. because nobody much cares about good grammar ennymore. Nevertheless, skim through the posts of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, especially a handwritten essay by a grammar-schooler about his dad’s love of “hores.” A taste:

Hores make you feel good. My dad wants a hores but my mom says no.

Horse

“Sex Worker” Is More Appropriate

Natch, good spelling is as important as good grammar.

BTW: Start making your plans now for National Punctuation Day, September 24th every year.

Plaster Saint?

So, the character who, in the interests of truth, justice and the American way, got the Jackie Robinson West Little League team stripped of its 2014 national title got himself in a bit a jam himself early yesterday morning.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Janes of suburban Evergreen Park, menaced a woman and her husband in the wee hours a block from his house Tuesday. He allegedly chased the woman, who ran into her house after she pulled into her driveway and saw him causing a ruckus. Janes then pounded on her front door and yelled at the couple to come out — using foul language. The couple called the police as Janes ran away. He was apprehended not far away with his arm bleeding.

Janes has been charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting a peace officer, public intoxication, and using threatening and vulgar language. At the time of his arrest, acc’d’g to the Trib, he refused to cooperate with police and would not say how he injured his arm.

Janes

Janes’ Mug Shot

Meanwhile, nine of the 13 members of the Jackie Robinson West team, traveled to the tony northwest suburb of Northbrook where they met and greeted some 300 kids and adults who came to see them at the local YMCA. The Saturday evening event was sponsored by the Northbrook Community Relations Commission. The players talked about their trip to the White House to meet President Obama, visiting Disney World, their work ethic, and what classes they liked in school.

As for Janes, he will be arraigned April 13 in Cook County Circuit Court.

Mayoral Miscellany

Doug Storm hosted all four candidates for Bloomington mayor last night on WFHB’s Interchange program.

Don’t worry: No blood was spilled.

Interchange

Click Image For Podcast

Perspective

The Onion, as always, nailing it:

Onion

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Bim Bam Boom

So, yeah, this holy land possesses thousands of thermonuclear weapons capable of turning our fair world into a smokeball. Russia packs a few thousand pika-don fireworks as well. The United Kingdom, France, and China long have been gleeful members of the nuke club. Add to them India, Pakistan, and Israel, all of whom have tinkered their way into armageddon territory.

Funny thing is, most of the above-mentioned gasp and wring their hands whenever another nation-state hints that it’d like to develop the capability to blow the world to bits. Some otherwise smart citizens even say Well, fair is fair: We have the Bomb, why can’t they?

As ludicrous as this sounds, the leaders of those countries who possess nuclear arsenals seem to have been made less rash by their Bombs. Well, at least ever so minutely less rash. Think of Vietnam and how the US didn’t turn it into a full-blown conflagration for fear the Chinese or the then-Soviets might decide to get trigger happy in response. The USSR itself similarly tampered its urges to kill in any number of conflicts in the last half century lest we blow them to smithereens.

So rather than counting the grateful dead by the millions, we’ve kept the number of war casualties to…, um, oh. Millions.

Bomb Test

Huzzah — We’re In The Club!

Still, those leaders of the nuke club fear the prospect of a wild-man gov’t joining its ranks. To wit, North Korea. It’s still trying to perfect its own penis-envy doomsday weapon and no doubt will put an effective warhead on a dependable missile sooner rather than later. And whereas the pioneer members of Nukes, Inc. seemed content merely to develop and test their big bangers — that being enough to scare the bejesus out of their potential rivals — N. Korea seems to dig verbally assaulting its perceived enemies with threats of leveled cities.

Take yesterday, for inst. Ri Su Yong, the North Korean foreign minister, issued one of his country’s regular and predictable threats against to US. If this nation and its allies, South Korea and Japan, keep on flexing their muscles in the neighborhood of North Korea, Ri said, his land’ll blast a US city into its constituent atoms. He elaborated:

Now the DPRK has the power of deterring the U.S. and conducting a pre-emptive strike as well, if necessary.

The muscle-flexing Ri refers to is the annual joint military exercise conducted by the US and S. Korea happening right now. Every year, the US and SoKo play-act at soldiering intentionally in eye- and earshot of those excitable North Koreans. And every year North Korea pledges to take out Los Angeles or Seattle if they don’t stop it.

I mean, possessing the capability to incinerate hundreds of millions of human beings with the push of a button is one thing, but bragging about it? Well, now, that’s going too far.

H-Bomb Ditty

The Renegades covered this old Bill Haley and His Comets single back in 1966. How bizarre a species are we that we can sing in celebration of global nuclear holocaust because that’d mean there’d be one lucky male survivor along with 13 women?

I beginning to think Darwin was wrong. There is no such thing as evolution — only devolution.

In any case, this is a very cool version of a very deranged song.

Hot Air

We’re all gonna die!

Like the headline sez, but it ain’t gonna be ebola that gets us.

This is not West Africa. We’re turning ourselves inside out over the fact that one guy has died (and he was recently arrived from West Africa.) Now two other people have it.

The populace of this holy land is having conniption fits over this non-epidemic, thanks mainly to a corporate media whose most precious talent is the ability to scare the poo out of us. They’re doing so.

Anyway, let’s turn to a little science. Have you caught this piece in the Washington Post?

From WaPo

Click Image For Full Story

Each of the grid charts illustrates how a specific disease spreads and kills (if at all). Ebola may be a killer but it ain’t a spreader. At least not a fast one. It simply does not jump from body to body easily.

An alert medical system and educated populace can stem the disease relatively quickly.

So, no, Centers for Disease Control head Dr. Thomas Frieden does not need to resign, despite the demands he do so by that noted epidemiologist Bill O’Reilly and the learned experts at breitbart.com. See, Frieden does not think ebola is gonna kill us all, nor does he want to seal our borders against the even more terrifying and dangerous natives of Africa.

Almost as perilous is what fear of ebola is turning us into. Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker states the case clearly and firmly (satire alert, natch):

From The New Yorker

You Know The Drill — Click For Full Story

And, of course, since we live in a nation awash in grievances, some among us consider themselves victims even though they haven’t got a fever. For instance, I know a nurse who is loudly proclaiming on the interwebs that nurses, as always, take the blame for everything. She’s referring to suggestions that the nurse who caught ebola from the Liberian man in Dallas may have employed faulty personal protection practices while caring for him.

The idea being, she might have touched her eyelid or mouth with a contaminated glove finger, a simple mistake that any human can make. But, naturally, chronically aggrieved parties interpret any criticism as the moral equivalent of slavery.

Post

Nah, Don’t Click The Image

This is the first time I’ve ever heard that nurses are being blamed for anything. They, like teachers, are the Virgin Marys of our society, above reproach, free of sin, spotless vessels. Now, suddenly, they’re the fall guys for everything?

We Americans are weird.

Big City Blues

The Herald Times reports this morning (paywall) that Monroe County is going full steam ahead with plans for a 220-spot parking garage next to the Zietlow Justice Center and jail. Only “The full cost of the project is not known.” and “A construction date has not been set.”

So scotch the full and the steam. The ahead while you’re at it, too.

All I know is the county and the city had better get cracking on throwing up some parking garages quickly, what with hotels springing up everywhere near the formerly quaint Courthouse Square. Hell, no fewer than three developments are in the planning stages for the intersection of Lincoln and Kirkwood avenues alone. And another is planned for the bank property at Washington and Kirkwood.

Hong Kong

Bloomington’s Future?

It’ll be easier to catch ebola in Bloomington than find a parking space once all these structures go up. To steal and mangle a line from Jerry Seinfeld, They’re gonna be building hotels inside of hotels soon.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion. Let’s build a nice round number of parking facilities spaced out to ring the downtown area. Say six of them. The existing parking facilities — on 4th Street, on Walnut and 7th, and behind the Buskirk Chumley Theater will give us a total of nine. (Let’s leave the Monroe County Municipal Library lot for library patrons, shall we?) Eliminate street parking for a two or three block radius around the Square, maybe more. Contract with a private company to run regular trolley service between all the lots, the Courthouse, the Zietlow facility, the hotels, the library, the Buskirk Chumley, the Sample Gates, City Hall, and whatever other attractions and municipal service centers there are in the vicinity.

Trolley

Catch The Trolley

How do we pay for it all? Slap a room tax on all the new hotels going up. Add a food and beverage tax to all appropriate places within the service area. Hell, a five-dollar surcharge on a hotel room isn’t going to kill anybody. And adding 50 cents to a dollar to everybody’s grub and booze tab isn’t going to stop people from stuffing their faces and getting sloshed.

If Bloomington wants to pretend it’s a big city, it’s going to have to act like one.

The Haircuts Of Kim Jong-Un

As a public service, I’m providing a photographic timeline of the North Korean Dear Leader’s coifs. Historians and researchers will benefit greatly from this.

KJU 1

A Very Young KJU With His Daddy-o, KJI

KJU 2

KJU Adopts The Adolph Look

KJU 3

KJU Opts For The Collegiate Crew Cut

KJU 4

KJU Shaves The Sides

KJU 5

KJU Ditches The Part

KJU 6

KGU Sprouts Speed Racer Villain Horns

KJU 7

KJU’s Pompadour/Fade Begins To Attain Towering Heights

You’re welcome

The Pencil Today:

TODAY’S QUOTE

“Clever tyrants are never punished.” — Voltaire.

WHIP ME, BEAT ME, TELL ME YOU LOVE ME

According to news reports, large groups of people in Pyongyang and other Democratic People’s Republic of Korea locales are stopping in the middle of their streets and spontaneously bursting into tears.

Their big boss, Kim Jong-il, has died.

Further proof that no matter how much a despot crushes them, too many people in this mad, mad, mad, mad world dig being under someone’s thumb

Kim And Some Other Bully

CHIMPS IN THE HOUSE

The Herald Times reports that Indiana state law does not govern the keeping of primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees as pets. The deep-thinkers in the state legislature, though, have demonstrated enough foresight to draw up regulations covering lions and crocodiles in the home. Phew.

Do I need to say this? If you yield to your burning desire to keep a chimp as a pet, you deserve it if he tears your face off.

Trust Me — He Doesn’t Want To Live In Your House

A GREAT BOOK MAKES A GREAT GIFT

Nancy Hiller

Look, it’s the last week of the Christmas shopping orgy. If you don’t buy at least one copy of Nancy R. Hiller‘s gorgeous book, “A Home of Her Own,” as a gift, well, there’s nothing medical or psychiatric science can do for you.

WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

A no spamily, no brattle zone.

◗ For years I’ve been saying I don’t trust people who don’t have books in their homes. My gang generally displays their books the way Ma & Pa Normal show off their wall-sized TVs or their new gas-guzzlers. But I had a nice conversation with Tyler Ferguson at Soma Coffee Saturday. We chatted of this and that and at one point she confided that she doesn’t read books, which surprised me because she’s a pretty smart cookie.

Tyler pointed out that she’s unable to sit still long enough to read. Can’t argue with that because she has the energy of the uranium atom. She’s involved with every single sport that has ever been concocted by the human mind. In fact, I hear she’s trying to start up a pitz league here in Bloomington. Pitz was a game played by pre-Columbian Meso-Americans starting around 1000 BCE. It was similar to volleyball, but was played with solid rubber balls. No word yet on whether Tyler’s new league will include the ritual human sacrifices of captives and slaves or the beheadings of the losing team’s captain that so thrilled the Maya and other crowds.

Anyway, how can I turn my back on Tyler Ferguson, one of our town’s true characters? I trust her with my life, or at least my laptop while I run to the restroom.

So I’ll amend my pronouncement: I don’t trust people who don’t have books in their homes — except for Tyler. Otherwise, I agree with the slogan in the Wall Photo shared by Mike Cagle and Craig L. Worrell: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fk them.”

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