House of the rising Moonglum

“Matchmaker cabbie, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch.”

For some reason this just seems so New York to me. It is things like this that make New York cool.

Windows Media streaming from Kurdish TV of the Iraqi elections. Really cool stuff. Some of the people speak arabic, some speak Kurdish. I can kinda make out some of the Arabic, but the Kurdish is just out there. My favorite though are all of the Kurd nationalistic music videos that they play between news segments.

Iraqis appear to have turned out in larger than expected number, but unfortunately it looks like only the braver of the Sunnis turned out. Falluja saw a reasonable turnout, but Tikrit saw almost none. They are going to have to realize at some point that most of the wealth in their country will no longer be diverted to their small town. The news again focuses on the attacks, but overall I was impressed by the reportage this time. They do a very good job of reporting both side, showing people who support the elections, the celebrations, as well as the violence. Hearing tales of celebrations in Baghdad was the most exciting thing for me. That city has been hit the hardest by the violence and the repercussions of the violence. It is easiest to hurt a large group of people by destroying water and electricity.

I just hope that the “higher than expected” turnout in Mosul and Fallujah turns into real numbers, but hopefully dramatic turnout in the Kurdish regions will help offset that. But I am so very impressed by the bravery of the average Iraqi. Taking a suicide bomber mentality and turning it into a suicide voter mentality.

“On the top of our privileged today are those who were killed in their way for voting. Their names should be perpetuated for ever! Their names should be written in Gold in Al-Fordos Square in Baghdad!” Shame on those in our country who don’t vote.

And I end with a story that gives me the most hope for a lack of dictatorships in the future of Iraq:

“The first thing we saw this morning on our way to the voting center was a convoy of the Iraqi army vehicles patrolling the street, the soldiers were cheering the people marching towards their voting centers then one of the soldiers chanted “vote for Allawi” less than a hundred meters, the convoy stopped and the captain in charge yelled at the soldier who did that and said:
“You’re a member of the military institution and you have absolutely no right to support any political entity or interfere with the people’s choice. This is Iraq’s army, not Allawi’s”.

This was a good sign indeed and the young officer’s statement was met by applause from the people on the street.
The streets were completely empty except for the Iraqi and the coalition forces ‘ patrols, and of course kids seizing the chance to play soccer!”

And finally, I haven’t seen Salam Pax post in a while, but that’s because he’s been making videos. If you have a spare 25 minutes watch his video as it gives an incredible background on the election.

Voting should start in Iraq in a few hours, and the press is already ratcheting up the suspense. Reading the front of CNN a single rocket attack on the embassy killing two Americans sounds like the end of the world. C’mon these are the people that kill thirty orphans in a hospital with a car bomb. Americans? Who cares. That’s not going to stop Iraqis from going to the polls. I just hope that some of the bloggers I have been reading are right, and the sunni populace is more willing to vote than the sunni parties. Heck maybe the sunni parties not showing up could be a good thing, if the voting Sunni populace join the Kurds and the moderate Shia in voting for more moderate (read: less funded by Iran) lists. Of course there are some bloggers who want to point out that the elections don’t really matter to many Iraqis who just want to live their lives and not have people shooting at them.

In the Kurdish regions there are also a number of other elections happening today, including the local elections and a non-binding referendum on wether or not to remain part of Iraq. That will be a very interesting poll. I would have to believe that the Kurds would want out of that mess as quickly as possible. They’ve been fighting for a homeland for years, to have a referendum with the kurdish flag as an option and not choose it? Well, I’ll be amazed if that one comes out in favor of Iraq.

And if you read that first link, dude, I think he called the Baathists ossified, narrow-minded, terrorist, Nazis. Wow. Doesn’t that mean the conversation is over?

I have decided that Stella’s world is not three dimensional. It is not even two dimensional. It only has one and a half dimensions. There is an axis along which she moves as she forages for food. That axis is WHEEL! Wheel is the only thing that brings her joy in life. To her it is a very long strip on land on which she can run. And every now and then there will be food. It is amazing to watch her run, and then stop and smell for food. Clearly deciding that there is non in this location, and moving on. Her world does get an extra half dimension though for those times when she does find some food or water and moves off of wheel to eat or drink. Then it’s back to WHEEL! So without further ado, I bring you, Stella World:

In line with Pepsi doing their 200,000,000 again (since only 5 million out of 100 million were claimed last time, pay pal is doing five free when you use Pay Pal as your primary fund source for the iTunes Music Store. I do wish that the free songs came with coke though. And with the few that Apple occasionally gives away for free, I thought they said this was pay downloads?

The paypal scheme is a good one though. I wonder how many kids get their allowance through paypal nowadays?

Edit: You need to open a new iTunes account. *sigh*

She is cooler than me.

I’ve been cleaning off some old computers in order to get rid of them. Thinking about e-bay, thinking about time vs. money. Maybe I’ll just recycle them. In any case, getting data off of really old computers can be a little challenging. Gotta transfer all those files off somehow. That is where my pair of localtalk bridges come in. Which leads me to my question… how do you network?

Nowadays my main file transfer protocol is scp and sometimes http. Nice and secure, pretty low overhead, I like it. The funny thing is I used to use much more sophisticated networking. The first time I hooked up my mac I had a localtalk network and appleshare mounts. All desktop based, very slick. I just don’t do that any more. I guess that’s mainly for the firewall and the desire to grab files from anywhere, but technically appleshare does work from anywhere. It just seems like the chooser was so much easier. What do other people think?

I think I like Saletan. When looking for more of his recaps, I found this article on Sen. Clinton talking about abortion. One thing she said was, “There is no reason why government cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised”. She then pointed out that under Clinton the abortion rates in the US dropped but under Bush they have risen. Hmmm….

More great quotes: Admit the goal is zero, and people will rethink birth control. “Seven percent of American women who do not use contraception account for 53 percent of all unintended pregnancies”

Interesting read.

I think that this is what my blog is supposed to be. William Saletan from Slate is posting 10 articles from the news and then doing a quick summary, and conclusions from the articles. I think that this is what I wanted my blog to be initially.

MEMRI translated a bunch of political ads. Some of them are quite moving. Some are just get out the vote ads while others are actually selling a specific list. Watch them and see how a different part of the world works.

There is also a quick rundown of the more likely winning parties participating in the upcoming elections. Daily show last night was great on this. “The islamic islamic party of the peoples union has gained a dramatic .8% of the votes putting them in front!”

Going through my old data in order to get rid of some old computers, and see if I can find some lost data. It is pretty wild what you dredge up on old machines. This is like going through a time capsule of my life. From finding old hardware (my 7500 can have 2 monitors with one of them going through a Voodoo II card! That was only a 3D card if you can even remember what that was. Had to have a 2D card as well to make it run!) And old data. Some Studio Aslag productions in there. Thane and EZ Cal. I was about to wipe one drive that wouldn’t mount, but then thought, now how did I used to force a Linux boot? Oh yeah, nothing like a bunch of OK’s ending with a nice full screen login command prompt.

Hopefully more treasures will appear!

A report just came out that shows that keeping drivers licenses from illegal aliens actually hurts national security. The conclusion is rather obvious when you think about it. By giving illegal aliens drivers licenses, it allows them to be tracked, thus aiding in knowing who is where. The article has a bunch of other reasons as well.

I’d hold off on buying that HD TV if I were you. He’s just guessing, but it seems like a pretty good guess to me.

After my wondering wether or not they were getting anywhere in stopping the attacks in Iraq it appears that they captured al-Kurdi, who is one of the worst terrorists in Iraq. He has organized a huge number of attacks in particular some of the most “spectacular” ones.

That is one step.

Zarqawi seems to have released another tape, which kind of puts the kabash on the theory that he was captured a couple weeks ago. I was hoping that it was true and that they were just keeping it quiet to keep getting good intelligence out of him. The fact is though that the number of attacks have been dramatically increasing leading up to the elections not decreasing. Of course these have all probably been planned for a while, so it is possible that capturing him wouldn’t have changed much.

In any case, he keeps digging himself in further and further with the Iraqi people. Especially the Shia. I know he wants to start a civil war, but I just don’t think that he would be on the winning side of that one. Blowing up scores of beggars waiting out front of a Mosque on Eid al Adha seems right religious to me. And saying that Democracy is un-Islamic? Apparently you have to have a theocracy for him to be happy. Guess what buddy? You don’t want a theocracy! You are outnumbered 3-1 in your own country, and Iran is backing the other side. You think Jordan or Saudi is going to come to your rescue? You think Osama is going to come to your rescue? I don’t think the Iranians have any trouble with a long drawn out bloody genocidal war. If he ever does manage to kick the US out he will have dug his own grave, Iranian backed Shias on the south and vengeful wealthy Kurds to the north.

Free elections in Iraq are the Sunni’s best chance. They need representation in the upcoming government since they will be writing the constitution. Even a small representation will be worth something. That document is going to need most if not all of the government’s signatures in order to be approved, so a little voice will have a lot of power.

I just pray to God (mine and theirs, it’s the same one wether or not you are democratic) that the violence is the voice of a madman and his followers and that the Sunni will turn out to the polls. But with the poll workers being killed in those towns, I don’t hold out much hope.

Remember the Zarqawi letter from last February? It is coming true step by step. He laid out his plan, and it is unfolding just like he said. Don’t we have people who read these things?

Ugh. It is so frustrating to watch. If you want up to the minute election news actually from Iraq, and I don’t mean the nice safe green zone election news that you get from CNN and FOX, check out this election news site that was put up to allow Iraqi’s to post about the elections. A number of my favorite bloggers post there, but they aren’t paid for this and they certainly aren’t pro writers. Apparently the Arabic site is better, but I can’t read that.

Oh yeah, and: Oh Crap. I guess Sistani couldn’t sit on the wayside any longer. He actually did throw his weight into the ring. Not sure which list 169 is, but if it is the one I think it is, that is a sad sign.

Oh yeah, remember when I was talking about how cold it was here? Well here is a shot of my breath on the window from last week (Click for full size image so you can see the cool detail of the ice crystals forming in straight lines!):

Hey East Coast! Get ready it is coming your way!

So there was a little bit of snow today. I went out and did some shoveling. I shoveled the snow off the top of my car. It is a rare day when you need to shovel the top of your car. I mean I started out with the old ice scraper and brush, but with over a foot of snow sitting on your car, that becomes obviously a fool’s errand. So once that was done I shoveled around the car:

But you see, I haven’t really been to the gym enough this week, so I decided that what the Omni really needed was a path from the curb, up the sidewalk to our yard and then around to our front door.

Which while I find it extremely humorous probably pissed off my neighbors since our landlord totally sucks and doesn’t seem to shovel. Well he does when it only snows a little bit, but apparently not when it snows a number of feet.

So as if this weren’t enough, apparently I decided that I needed to do some more. Sue told me her car was half way down Carmen (end of story: it wasn’t) so I decided to go looking for it to do some more shoveling. I went up and down the “good” half of Carmen twice, because I knew there was no way that she would go down the other half. The bad half. The cursed half. You see bad things happen to you when you park down the cursed half of Carmen. Normally it involves going to hell. Hell of course being the city pound, but that is a story for another day.

So I went walking down the bad half of Carmen, and was checking out all the snowed on cars. (At this point I would like to take a moment to mention that walking up and down streets looking for a car while everything is buried in a foot of snow is somewhat difficult. I knocked a lot of snow off the backs of cars looking for Sue’s Geneseo sticker. While staggering through a foot of crappy slushy snow.) So I was getting through to the end of the cursed street when I noticed a truck sitting in the middle of the street.

Ut oh I thought.

Then I noticed that it wasn’t sitting in the middle of the street, but half in the front of an SUV and half in the street. Dude. Well there was no one there so I called it in at 311 and they assured me that someone would come and cart it off. Then I kept going and noticed that there were a whole slew of cars that had been destroyed by that truck. Three looked like they had their whole engine smashed and a slew of others had big chuncks taken out of the side. After talking to some people and digging a few people out of their spots I got the full story from someone driving by who saw it.

Apparently the guy some down the snow covered street in his Suburban accelerating the whole way smashing into everything. (When I went for a second look later I notice debris littering the street.) He finally ended impaled on the SUV. (TRUCK HAS KILLED TRUCK!) At this point FIVE police cars come skidding into the street and they see him stopped and all jump out with guns drawn. The drivers jumped out and started throwing beer bottles. Which they had apparently been drinking from. They were carted off leaving behind the CARnage.

From there the day gets a little less surreal. I went back up a different street looking for Sue’s car, helped a few more people out (who only had ice scrapers. DUDE! You live in Chicago! And where are your gloves? Moron.) Heh, like you can get out of a foot of snow without a shovel. Finally made it back home, warmed up, called my mom to tell her the story and started thinking, oh my, what if one of those destroyed cars was Sue’s? I didn’t look at those too carefully. They were all covered in shockwave disturbed snow and that engaged me enough that I could have missed it. So out I went again. As fortune would have it, I ran into Sue and we went and dug her car out. (Not on Carmen.) In the end the great white hunters were victorious.

Remember the cube. Here is a shootout of the specs. Shockingly similar!

I do sort of wonder how I got onto the Sigma Gamma Rho (an African American Sorority) invite list. Looks like a rocking party, but still…?