Just still somebody afraid from stones

When you combine an incomplete understanding of the English language with a) sarcasm or b) mental illness, you get something like this comment, which I found on a Turkish news site's story about an archaeological find. The story is here, but I've copied the comment verbatim for fear it will somehow disappear from the web. Things like that happen, you know.

"for sure is from Mars . names also from cities provide that . all are from marsian origin . the alfabet or maybe the corect word is marsabet is an alian one .everybody in western word know that . just still somebody afraid from stones . jews and greeks by the way forced before milion years to pluto . to belive in a jewish religion and have a greek based education and politic system its real hell "

This was posted by someone whose user id is constantinos kio. I leave it to you (or perhaps Dr. Dahl's translation software) to speculate on its meaning.

Be afraid from stones.

Forget Java; start coding in ...

Proto-Elamite. It's the oldest language we know about and can't yet read, but stand by, because a bright boy or group of same is closing in on it.

A while back, namely 3200-2900 BCE, some folks in what is now, God help it, Iran, used this text to record ... something. And if some high-powered computers have anything to say about it, we'll know soon. The sort-of-gushing BBC story is here, including a good picture of some of the proto-Elamite writing itself.

I called the scientist in question (Oh, yeah. Archaeologists are always happy to drop what they're doing and chat with unknown bloggers and cranks. They love it. Give it a try.) The text of the interview is reproduced here:

WCA: I'd like a pizza to go and no anchovies.

Dr. Jacob Dahl: You've got the wrong number. I spell my name, "Danger." (Hangs up)

WCA: Oh, man. Nobody will come up into the hills at all!

WCA: (calls back) Is this Dr. Dahl?

DJD: Are you the prat who just called me?

WCA: Yes. I mean no, no not at all. I'm someone quite else.

DJD: What do you want?

WCA: About this proto-Elamite stuff -- what do you think it'll say when you get it deciphered?

DJD: How the hell should I know? That's why we need to decipher it. Was there anything else?

WCA: Why does the porridge bird lay its egg in the air?

DJD: (Hangs up)

Game changer!

No, I'm not talking about Trump's asinine little stunt. I mean the news today that Italy's own Sylvio "Bunga-bunga" Berlusconi is dropping out of future contention for Prime Minister -- so that he can run fpr the US Presidency! Ok, I made that last part up. But he is out of the picture, he says, in Italia.

Wanna bet?

Recurring nightmare theme

Over the years, except for the years when I wasn't driving (1976 to 1978, more or less,) I always seem to have had an automotive bête noire -- a car, driven by others, that always seemed to be in my way, underfoot, and generally annoying. For a while, it was the Datsun B210, a tinny, underpowered little lump, one of which it seemed was always ahead of me, demonstrating its inability to get out of its own way.

Later on, it was other cars. The early mini-vans were bad, bad, bad, mostly because of the poor distribution of driving skills among their target market. Just last month, I had a fit of Honda Odyssey hating, not so much for operative as aesthetic reasons (them's butt ugly, in my arrogant opinion.) But I realize, especially upon reading this blog post from Jalopnik, that I have always, from the day of its inception, hated the Prius. Still do.

And now the damn things are outselling not only reasonable vehicles (e.g., the Ford F-150) but also Toyota's own wretchedly-bland Camry. I think secession may be our only hope.

Unless ... we can convince the Italians to mass produce something like this little darling. Imagine one of them with, say, a Ford 302 V-8 or even a Nissan 6 pulled out of a wrecked Z. Ommmmmmm.

Oh, what is it? A 1956 Lancia Aurelia.

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The question was asked, how come you weren't driving back in the Seventies? It was a combination of three things: a misplaced, idealistic notion that you could get along in the American Midwest without a car (totally false unless we're talking downtown Chicago;) a deep disgust with the last five or nine motor vehicles I'd owned, all of which were ancient, poorly maintained, and poorly built in the first place; and simple penury.

Absolutely god damn right

As Martin Sheen's character says in Apocalypse Now, "Never get out of the boat!"

Having been driven around in India by locals (you couldn't have paid me enough to get behind the wheel, myself,) I can attest to the validity of this article's thesis: Never Drive in India.

Oh, and in another example of "Absolutely god damn right," the Detroit Free Press' Editor in Charge of the Bleedin' Obvious says, "Detroit's next police chief will have hands full."

As if the last five or six of 'em didn't, in all possible ways you can interpret the phrase.

A shameless plug for some hack's new book

Some guy in Ann Arbor has written a book, and because he did us a favor or two a while back, he thought he could lean on us for a bit of free publicity. Turns out, he was right. He could.

As John Cleese, I think it was, said, I can highly recommend this book to people who quite like this sort of thing.

Obama landslide predicted

Ross Perot endorses Romney.

Recently Read

These are not new books, and in fact, only one of them was new to me. The others were revisited with great pleasure. But if you want to wallow in the Civil War, you can't do better than Stephen W. Sears.

• To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign, Stephen W. Sears. If you want to know why George McClellan was the political George W. Bush and the military Benito Mussolini of his day, this is the book to read.
  
• Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, Stephen W. Sears. Horrifying and probably treasonous behavior on the part of the Federal command, astonishing courage and sacrifice from the rank and file, and the ouster, for the first time, of Lee from a northern invasion.
  
• Chancellorsville, Stephen W. Sears. After Lincoln booted McClellan and installed "Fighting Joe" Hooker in command of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker invaded Northern Virginia, stumbled into the area called the Wilderness, and got his butt kicked right back across the Rapidan by Lee and Jackson.
  
• Gettysburg, Stephen W. Sears. And of course, after Chancellorsville, Lee moved north again, up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Then, his brain quit working, and he allowed himself to be pulled into a meeting engagement with the Union army, this time under George Meade, who was essentially the first of the Federal generals to understand offensive movement, defensive action. Lee lost.
  

The thing I like about Sears is that he's a careful and well-educated historian who can also write. Unlike the popularizers like Shaara and his ilk, Sears has no axe to grind, he just explains and does it brilliantly. I haven't done an actual count, but these four books together probably comprise 2500 pages, and you'll be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the war in the East. I don't know what Sears may be working on now, but I hope it's more of the same. If he'd just take on first and second Manassas and Fredricksburg, virtually the whole pre-Grant eastern theater would be covered, and we could remainder a lot of lesser books on the subject.

Unpopular Music

Various churches around the country are again defying Federal Law by endorsing political candidates. This is nothing new, and the government, quaking in its boots at the thought of the uproar that would ensue, generally ignores them instead of ordering drone strikes on the miserable bastards stripping them of their tax-exempt status and demanding tax payments back to the Eighteenth Century.

However, there's another odd category of public personality whose endorsement of one or another posturing right-wing jackass News Corp shareholder should, in the opinion of this blog, be regulated. We support the right of people like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock to vote how they please, but it does seem odd that they're allowed to carry on the way they do and yet pay no taxes.

What? They're not tax-exempt? You mean to tell me Nugent is for-profit? And he's still around? And that little ponce, the other one, too? Wait a minute. That implies that people actually pay to hear them? Oh lordy lord, I'm a-moving to Canadia.

Continuity of Command

A while back, I posted a kind of scorecard of malfeasance and hanky-panky at the command levels of the Detroit police dept. Well,the tradition continues. Chief Ralph Godbee has been suspended for theoretically the same thing.

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Update 2012 10 09: Godbee resigned. The mayor and the Police Commission are snarling at each other over who gets to cover the whole thing up investigate. Rick Snyder is frowning at everybody.