'Nuff said

I dunno, every now and then there are stories you simply can't add anything to. . .

A circumcision ritual practiced by some Orthodox Jews has alarmed city health officials, who say it may have led to three cases of herpes - one of them fatal - in infants. But after months of meetings with Orthodox leaders, city officials have been unable to persuade them to abandon the practice.

The city's intervention has angered many Orthodox leaders, and the issue has left the city struggling to balance its mandate to protect public health with the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

"This is a very delicate area, so to speak," said Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden.

The practice is known as oral suction, or in Hebrew, metzitzah b'peh: after removing the foreskin of the penis, the practitioner, or mohel, sucks the blood from the wound to clean it.

It became a health issue after a boy in Staten Island and twins in Brooklyn, circumcised by the same mohel in 2003 and 2004, contracted Type-1 herpes. Most adults carry the disease, which causes the common cold sore, but it can be life-threatening for infants. One of the twins died.

Cindy's 15

I was kinda tickled to see the small mob of people milling around the intersection of Scott and N. Decatur last night waving signs in sympathy with Cindy Sheehan last night. I waved and honked, what else can you do?

I was on my way to a rehearsal for a theater production I'm in and made a cautious mention of the protest and someone started huffing about how horrible it was that Cindy was defaming the sacrifice of her dead son and how she should be a good girl and just shut the f*** up and take it like all of the other grieving parents. (I'm paraphrasing a bit )

I kinda expected something like that since I've heard excerpts of Festus's minions on Air America excoriating Cindy as if she were spawned in blood, acid and flames from Satan's own loins. Sad, really. But as much as I hate to say it, I think Cindy should realize her limitations as a media star and start to wind it up. She's accomplished a lot, but she's up against the problem that some people can't separate the message from the medium. Maybe a visit from Howard Dean might cap it off like some crisis negotiator talking someone out of leaping off a bridge to their death.

She's been quoted as saying that Bush is a murderer and terrorist, which might be semantically accurate, but it just doesn't play well. The harm of these statements is that anyone sitting on the fence over the issue of why we went to Iraq will only see the wingnut side of Sheehan and not hear her main plea.

Why did you mislead us into war in Iraq, Mr. Bush? Why did my son have to die for someone elses freedom?

I'd like to know the answer to that too. . .

"Broken Flowers"

Within the heirarchy of bad movies is your standard mundane crap, then below that is your steaming crap which is overshadowed only by the category of vile steaming crap. The only thing that saved “Broken Flowers” from surpassing vile steaming crap was about 5 seconds of totally gratuitous nudity.

It was one of those films where I seriously considered checking with the people in line to buy tickets so I could talk anyone out of see this.

This is officially the film that inaugurates Bill Murry into the Woody Allen class of overstaying ones welcome. Had the film been as bad as “Lost In Translation” it would have at least been an interesting failure, but here it seems Murry revisits the level of vile steamingness of “The Razor’s Edge” and succeeds in surpassing it.

Jarmusch is an extremely boring director. If the film, which felt like it was two hours, but was only a little over an hour and a half, was edited down to remove all of the car driving scenes, the Murry staring into the camera scenes, the plane and airport scenes, it’s actual narrative content would not have amounted to much more than 15 minutes.

Bill, I think it’s time you took up golf full time. . .

This just in!

In another totally incompetent effort to clarify exactly what level of semantic conflict we are at with terrorist, Festus states "We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001," Got that? "War" is now back in, "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism." is out. What a relief.

We still breathlessly await clarification on where the terrorists responsible for 9/11 were the day we invaded Iraq. . .

Ouch!

Nice pic huh? Ya gotta love the smartasses that put out this kinda stuff. . .

OK, so like, Apple finally figured out that some people want more than one button on a mouse. So since putting two actual buttons would be tanatamount to admitting maybe they made a mistake all of these 20 years or so since the Mac's been out, they decided to go completely ape-shit and put two programable sensors and a discrete rollerball on it just to one-up the whole concept. I've been happy using a one button mouse, but I have to confess that having a second button in Windows to use instead of "control" clicking has been pretty useful. Still, I doubt I'll go out and buy one of these. Am not sure I'll remember how I programed it. . .