3647 MetaFilter comments by thomcatspike (displaying 101 through 150)

Losing Gilligan and Maxwell Smart just a few weeks apart is sad. What great memories of a very funny show and a funny man.
comment posted at 3:53 PM on Sep-26-05

Sheehan arrested for... protesting. Will the ACLU please, PLEASE take this case up to the highest courts in the land. Enough with the police intimidation and ritual abuse of power.
comment posted at 8:51 AM on Sep-27-05

Bush administration threatens veto against Geneva Convention. After hearing about the latest torture scandal in Iraq, Republican Armed Services Committee Senators John McCain, John W. Warner, and Lindsey Graham are seeking an amendment to a defense bill which would require the military to abide by the Geneva Convention... but the Bush administration is reportedly opposed to any such legislation, and have threatened to veto it. To make matters worse, many prominent Congressional Republicans are also opposed to abiding by the Geneva Convention, to the point that overturning such a veto is far from assured.
comment posted at 2:18 PM on Oct-6-05

Tibor "Ted" Rubin, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp and United States Army hero in World War II, received the Medal of Honor today from President Bush, 55 years after earning it. Rubin, a Hungarian Jew, was never submitted for a medal during the war due to anti-Semitism.
comment posted at 11:03 AM on Sep-27-05

Why is everybody mad about the cups?

Last month there were those who were mad about “made-in-Israel-paper cups” at the King Khaled National Guard Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Now it’s a quote from novelist Armistead Maupin inscribed on Starbucks coffee cups at Baylor University that have made others mad!

Concerned Women for America charged that Starbucks is promoting a homosexual agenda with some paper cups containing Maupin’s quote:
"My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short."
CWA demanded that the cups containing the quote be removed from campus. Baylor Dining Services complied with the request.

(What exactly is the “homosexual agenda”?)
comment posted at 4:52 PM on Sep-21-05

Tons of British Food for Katrina Victims to be Incinerated (link to Mirror article)
More red tape embarrassment for the Katrina relief effort. This time, tons of food donated by the UK is set to be incinerated rather than delivered to hungry evacuees. The FDA recalled the food rations, which had been loaded onto trucks and sent out for distribution, because they had been "condemned as unfit for human consumption". Never mind the glaring fact that these are the same food rations being eaten by British soldiers in Iraq right now.
comment posted at 5:19 PM on Sep-20-05

Taking a leaf out of Ann Coulter's book. Jillian Brandes, a writer for the UNC-Chapel Hill student paper "The Daily Tar Hill" wrote an opinion column that included the sentence, I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport. She was then fired from the paper. But don't worry about her future. "Within a day, she was being interviewed by radio stations throughout the country. Her case was gobbled up by the conservative media and featured on a major professional journalism Web site Thursday."
comment posted at 11:49 AM on Sep-20-05
comment posted at 3:08 PM on Sep-20-05

Where did all the bananas go? Bananas are awesome. Popular Science has an article about how they are going extinct. Apparently in the early 1900's the main variety of banana died out and was replaced by what we know today. According to this article, it's happening again.

o/~ Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Stack banana till de mornin' come
Daylight come and me wan' go home o/~


comment posted at 10:42 AM on Sep-20-05

We Had to Kill Our Patients : while this may not hit the US press for some time, the UK's Mail on Sunday reports that doctors in New Orleans chose to euthanize patients who were dying in agony and had no chance of survival during the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.
comment posted at 4:41 PM on Sep-13-05

Michael Brown, head of FEMA is relieved of duties. After a rocky week and increasing doubts about his background and experience (like a padded resume), Brown gets pulled from FEMA duty. Pretty surprising to see, given that the "CEO President" proclaimed "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" just a few days ago.
comment posted at 11:10 AM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 1:31 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 3:11 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 3:59 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 4:04 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 4:22 PM on Sep-9-05

Planning on taking part in this Sunday's Freedom Walk? Better register today or you will face arrest on Sunday. If you'd rather cheer on the march instead, be prepared to peer over a four-foot high "snow fence."
comment posted at 8:52 AM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 11:25 AM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 12:14 PM on Sep-9-05
comment posted at 2:52 PM on Sep-9-05

Louisiana Leads in Army Corps Spending, but Millions Had Nothing to Do With Floods
In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

[H]undreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.
comment posted at 8:19 AM on Sep-8-05
comment posted at 8:21 AM on Sep-8-05

Is "Refugee" a racist term? The Rev. Jesse Jackson seems to think so.
comment posted at 3:26 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 4:20 PM on Sep-6-05

Bob Denver, beloved to millions as the lovable beatnick Maynard G. Krebs on the early television show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, has died at age 70.
he was also on a later show about seven stranded castaways
comment posted at 1:13 PM on Sep-6-05
comment posted at 1:19 PM on Sep-6-05

Convoy on the go. Most of you probably already know this, but a massive convoy of food in and people out of downtown New Orleans is underway. On CNN they have video from helicopters, showing lines of hundreds of busses. This is a huge relief.
comment posted at 1:43 PM on Sep-2-05

``I don't treat my dog like that,' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the [dead] woman in the wheelchair. ``I buried my dog.' He added: ``You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here.' People dying and left in streets waiting for aid at a New Orleans Convention Center.
comment posted at 10:07 AM on Sep-1-05
comment posted at 11:24 AM on Sep-1-05
comment posted at 11:41 AM on Sep-1-05
comment posted at 1:53 PM on Sep-1-05
comment posted at 2:12 PM on Sep-1-05

Whats it like to be a Pretty Girl I found this link while surfing this morning and thought it might make an interesting thread. Not that the writer has any great insights to share, but what is it like to be a Pretty Girl? Pros? Cons? Comments to the contrary? Has anyone been hoodwinked by a Pretty Girl? Any good stories out there to pass a Thursday morning?
comment posted at 10:24 AM on Sep-1-05

Let the bush bashing begin. Funding for work on New Orleans' flood prevention system slowed to a trickle in 2003, and many people (long before Monday) claimed that was due to the Iraq war. [more inside]
comment posted at 3:58 PM on Aug-30-05
comment posted at 8:44 AM on Aug-31-05

Cats in sinks. Nothing less, nothing more.
comment posted at 3:27 PM on Aug-29-05

Backyard Pit Bull Breeders "I like having very vicious, angry dogs. I'm going to teach them not to like other dogs. I'm going to agitate them, make them aggressive. That way when it's about business, they are going to be serious." Are guys like this the reason that we keep hearing horror stories like these? Are Pit Bulls inherently dangerous?
comment posted at 2:28 PM on Aug-26-05

Damn, I likes me some catfish! The Giant Mekong Catfish isn't the only big fish to be found, though. Sadly, the behemoth is facing extinction, largely due to overfishing. Fortunately, some are working on saving the fish. Of course, fish aren't only found in the water.
comment posted at 10:42 AM on Aug-26-05
comment posted at 10:49 AM on Aug-26-05

Lysol?
comment posted at 4:34 PM on Aug-25-05
comment posted at 7:58 AM on Aug-26-05

Goldwing Retriever
A Swedish company named Coming Through has developed a Honda GL1800 powered motorcycle mounted towing rig that lets the bike weave through traffic, arrive at the broken down car quickly, unfold the towing rig and then haul a car of up to 5500 pounds away before the traditional towtruck can even get there!
Here's a photo gallery and videos of the system in action. via
comment posted at 12:14 PM on Aug-25-05
comment posted at 12:29 PM on Aug-25-05

Big Balloons!!!
comment posted at 9:52 AM on Aug-25-05

Critical Mass in Milwaukee ran into some "problems" with police on the July 29th ride: “I unfortunately chose to lock my bike with a friend and go see what was happening with the group who had been stopped at the yellow light. I ran down the street just in time to see police tackle a man on a bike who had a baby carriage attached to end of his bike. After he was pulled to the ground another officer violently pushed over his baby carriage with the baby inside,” More coverage and some photos.
comment posted at 9:13 AM on Aug-24-05
comment posted at 9:24 AM on Aug-24-05
comment posted at 9:30 AM on Aug-24-05

The second Indigenous Nations' Games of Para doesn't have a website and there's not even an AP story describing the events, but there are a lot of photos from the games.
comment posted at 9:05 AM on Aug-23-05

Pat Robertson calls for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate, said on "The 700 Club" it was the United States' duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism."
comment posted at 10:45 AM on Aug-25-05

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