The King of Pointland

Wendy's

I haven't been to Wendy's Restaurant for years, but I have been to Andrew and Maureen's house, as recently as Saturday afternoon, in fact. It was there that I wondered, aloud, about the future decor of that fine fast-food establishment.

For my readers who come from lands bereft of Wendy's: the tables there are covered with old-timey newspaper ads from the 19th and early 20th centuries, ads for products like Mr. McGillicutty's Patented Shaving Elixer, High Quality Reducing Undergarments, and so forth. It's great fun to visit when you're a kid and eat hamburgers and french fries, and stare at the table, and laugh with your parents and your brother, and then stare at the table some more. When you return by yourself many years later and reflect nostalgically on that magical time when you were an integral part of a loving nuclear family, it's rather depressing, so depressing that you stop going to Wendy's altogether. Americans know what I'm talking about, right people?

What I wonder is this: in one hundred years, will the tables be covered with web pages from the late 20th and early 21st century? If so, I hope my head is mounted on a robot so I can still be alive and explain to people what those ads were all about.

An Open Letter to WETA

Dear WETA,

Please don't insult my intelligence.

Here's the deal. You sent me a ballot for the "Second Annual WETA Member's Choice Program Awards." I have an opportunity to vote for the best History and Documentary, Music/Performance, Public Affairs program, etc. That's wonderful. I'm glad you value my opinion, or at least pretend to (perhaps to butter me up for "The Eisner 2005 Challenge Grant Contribution Form" included with the ballot).

But could you spare me the pseudo-secret bullshit on the envelope? I'm talking about the "CONFIDENTIAL" red stamp. God forbid somebody else gets a hold of that ballot. They might vote for Tucker Carlson Unfiltered instead of Frontline and bring the integrity of the entire awards process into question! And about this "MEMBER BALLOT ENCLOSED, For addressee only:" my letter carrier makes a habit of delivering my mail to random people on his route, but when he sees that, I bet he'll be sure to put it in my mailbox instead. It's probably overkill, though, because that CONFIDENTIAL stamp will have my neighbor quaking in her boots.

Sincerely,
David Eisner

P.S. I see that I missed Regency House Party. Will you be re-airing that?

It's Engrish Time

One of my roommates picked this up at the Dollar Store: (click for larger images)

Rock Hard Family Values

The Eagles have just scored a touchdown. It's commercial time, and I find myself imagining a family somewhere in middle America watching the game with their children and hearing a woman promise a "strong, lasting erection" for those who choose Levitra.

Winning Hearts and Minds

In One Night, Iraqi Turns From Friend to Foe. For the record, those were not my pills.

Also, for you covert intelligence buffs: Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain.

"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"

I hope the CIA operatives and the SSB operatives don't step on eachother's feet in Cuba.

Finally, oops.

Should I Be Worried?

I'm not even showing.

Stoopid Reality

Today I am wearing nothing but black.

And Drew

Happy Birthday, Andrew. How does it feel to be old?

In other news, I meant to post a link to this article the other day:

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground
War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 14, 2005; Page A01

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Our fearless leader was right, Iraq is a vital part of the War on Terror. It's a vital part of losing it.

Has anybody noticed how cold it is? I have. Now this is what January should feel like. None of that 70 °F crap.

In personal matters, thanks to everybody for showing me a good time on my birthday, and thanks as well to my parents for treating me to Sushi-Ko on Sunday. Earlier in the day the three of us visited the National Building Museum. We went to see the Origami as Architecture exhibit, but we stayed for the Liquid Stone. Until Sunday I had only negative associations with concrete, primarily centered around my distaste for Brutalism, and the many times I skinned my knees riding my Sears-brand skateboard. After seeing the exhibit, though, I'm actually excited about new directions in concrete! Honestly.

Divine Monopoly

As some of you may know, I have been wondering whether the devastating loss of human life following the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami can be compatible with the concept of a good, omnipotent, and omniscient, God. This is probably why my brother Dan(ny) brought this Slate piece to my attention:

In the wake of the tsunami disaster, it's time for believers to take a more proactive role in world events. It's time to boycott God.

Centuries of uncritical worship have clearly produced a monster. God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place. They will excuse his unwillingness to stave off destruction with alibis ("God wasn't there when the tsunami hit"—Suketu Mehta) and relativising ("for each victim tens of thousands yet live"—Russell Seitz), even if those excuses contradict God's other attributes, such as omnipresence or love for each individual life . . .

This was my response:

[Dan(ny),]

This is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Boycotting God will be ineffective because there is only one God. What we really need is free market competition, which in this case means a return to polytheism. With the proper market incentives, we would find a pantheon of deities competing for our adoration. The cost in human lives would plummet, as well as the cost in worship. I suspect the market clearing price of divine grace is around 3 to 4 minutes of worship per week, and not the 3 to 4 hours we see now.

-David

Getting a Handle On It

From time to time I find myself at parties where a dresser is being burned in someone's back yard. I don't know why this keeps happening, but it does. At the most recent such party, Jason noticed one of the drawer handles droop and then release a silvery liquid which looked a lot like mercury. The base metal inside the brass-coated handle had melted.

It eventually cooled into a solid piece of metal, which I saved. I wondered what it was made of. My guess was Zinc.

Using the ESEM at work, I can now tell you that I was mostly right.

Is That Something?

It had been my habbit these many years to break my eggs against the side of the frying pan, until I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. In that movie, the character Theo nonchalantly fries a few eggs while his sister and her lover have sex on the kitchen floor. The audience is shocked and outraged when, in a masterful twist, Bertolucci has the brother break the eggs not on the side of the pan, but, rather, by tapping them sharply with the edge of a spatula!

Since then I have follwed Theo's example, as I did this morning. Tap Tap went the spatula, and Crack went the shell. Inserting my thumbs into the narrow crevice, I carefully pulled the egg apart and watched as not one, but two yolks fell to the sizzling butter below.

What does this mean? Is it an omen? What do the ancients tell us?

Your America

From the Washington Post, January 23, 2002, page A9:

In the face of continued criticism of U.S. treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday mounted a vigorous, hour-long defense of security procedures used at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"The treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay is proper, it's humane, it's appropriate, and it is fully consistent with international conventions," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing. "No detainee has been harmed. The numerous articles, statements, questions, allegations and breathless reports on television are undoubtedly by people who are either uninformed, misinformed or poorly informed." [For the non LexisNexis'd]

From yesterday's Washington Post:

Also yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union released new documents showing that 26 FBI agents reported witnessing mistreatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees, indicating a far broader pattern of alleged abuse there than reported previously.

The records, obtained in an ongoing ACLU lawsuit, also show that the FBI's senior lawyer determined that 17 of the incidents were "DOD-approved interrogation techniques" and did not require further investigation. The FBI did not participate in any of the interviews directly, according to the documents.

The new ACLU documents detail abuses seen by FBI personnel serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, including incidents in which military interrogators grabbed prisoners' genitals, bent back their fingers and, in one case, placed duct tape over a prisoner's mouth for reciting the Koran.

From the December 26th Post:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water," an unidentified agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004, for example. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."

To be fair to the Secretary of Defense, he may have meant, "No detainee has been harmed yet, but we're working on it."

If you read the rest of the first article, you'll see that we're sending our prisoners to allies like Egypt, who take care of the really nasty stuff. After all, they're better at it. But we're learning.

Does anyone still care about what's happening to our country?

One of my relatives can't understand why I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, as they sometimes "go too far." I am a member because my government, acting in my name, sometimes goes too far, and it takes organizations like the ACLU to bring such disgraceful abuse to light.

Predictions

As the new year begins, it's prediction time. I read these with a grain of salt, because, in my experience, human beings are often lousy prognosticators.

Here's why I like Ed Felton. Before making his 2005 predictions, he scored his previous annual forecast.

And check out the Wall Street Journal!

Finally, here are my predictions for 2005:

1. I will eat at least one pizza this year, but probably more.
2. Having run out of my preferred brand of unscented deodorant, I will be forced to use my emergncy backup: a two year old stick of Old Spice.
3. I will go to a movie by myself.
4. I will consider eating a slightly stale snackfood product, think better of it, and, finally, try to eat it anyway.
5. Speaking of snackfood, I will eat an entire bag of Veggie Bootie in one sitting, and then feel guilty about it.
6. This will be the year I read Jane Eyre. [Now I have to do it.]
7. I will neglect my bjournal for days, and possibly weeks, at a time.
8. I will stay up late working on my bjournal, when I should be sleeping. [Score!]

I Control the Horizontal

Don't you love it when human nature and technology come together? This is somewhere, it's . . Tokyo. I am making an actual camera move around in Tokyo. Apparently, in this part of Tokyo, it is not the custom for naked women to walk around in parking lots. Oh well.

A Contract With God

Bye bye, Will Eisner. Surely yours was the most beautiful of last names. Also, you were a ground breaking cartoonist.

Social Securitah

The Post has a brief but illuminating overview of the Social Security "crisis" debate.

Tea Pictures

Photos from the final Tea of 2004. Enjoy.