In France, says Christophe, a substance may not legally be labeled "ice cream" until it contains eight egg yolks per quart.

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/28/2005 03:15:00 PM |

[...] L&J haven't given even a cursory second thought to what it means for every child under the age of 12 to disappear.

Whatever the precise figure of the disappeared, however, we can safely assume that it included hundred of thousands, if not millions of young, attractive white women. Buck is watching CNN. Think of it: Millions of missing white women, all at the same time. What would CNN do? Would they cover them all? Or maybe just the blonde ones?

A brief look at the new "prequel" in the store reveals that Carpathia is actually the result of genetic engineering. Sometimes, the blatant pandering is so transparent it boggles my mind that anyone can buy this tripe. I mean, come on... The Antichrist will arise from genetic engineering?? They should have had him grow from an aborted fetus following the GE, that way we could have worked abortion into it too!

Followed by this clarification from McArdle (presumably not Jane Galt):

Ah, but you leave out the best part. Carpathia is the result of genetic engineering combining the DNA of two homosexuals! So now we've got three of the four G's: God, Genetic engineering, and Gay marriage. You don't suppose they'll find a way to work Gun control into the mix too, do you?

Mark follows with, among other things:

Why would Satan construct his minion by a method that practically guarantees that he'll be sterile? Didn't he see "The Devil's Advocate"? If I were Satan, I'd watch every movie ever made about me, both to see how I get defeated and because I'd have a huge ego.

And in another branch of the thread, about which real-life events had the highest death toll, this I-didn't-know-that from Sandals:

As a side note, Slaughterhouse Five cites wildly played-up casualty counts for Dresden based on the work of David Irving. (Yes, that David Irving.)

So much joy in one posting.

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/26/2005 10:47:00 PM |

BOUNTIFUL, Utah --The 11-year-old boy lost for four days in a mountain wilderness did just what he had been taught, his parents said Wednesday: He stayed on his trail and avoided strangers, even though they were searching for him.[...]

They described the boy as social immature, but not mentally disabled.

The parents said Brennan had seen people searching for him on horse and ATV, but avoided them because of what he had been taught.

"He stayed on the trail, he avoided strangers," Jody Hawkins said. "His biggest fear, he told me, was that someone would steal him."

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/22/2005 02:05:00 PM |

Another of the most common types of torture described by all of these writers is that of excremental assault. According to Harold Kaplan, the purpose of excremental assault was to produce a sense of self-disgust in the victims and thereby diminish their will to survive.18 Lucie Begov vividly describes the "Scheißkommando" as an example of this excremental assault. While imprisoned in Auschwitz, she was forced to empty large wagons filled with human excrement from latrines all over camp. The purpose of this exercise was to humiliate and degrade her and weaken her resistance to the deathly forces around her.

When Ruth Klüger and her mother were transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, they were bombarded with another form of excremental assault. They were transported in crowded cattle cars without food, water, or any form of sanitation: "Bald stank der Wagen nach Urin und Kot, man mußte dafür Gefäße von Mitgebrachten finden, und es gab nur eine Luke um diese zu leeren." ["The wagon soon stank from urine and excrement; one had to find containers for it from the things that one had brought with, and there was only one hatch through which they could be emptied."]

It began in the trains, in the locked boxcars -- eighty to a hundred people per car --crossing Europe to the camps in Poland:

The temperature started to rise, as the freight car was enclosed and body heat had no outlet...The only place to urinate was through a slot in the skylight, though whoever tried, usually missed, spilling urine on the floor...When dawn finally rose...we were all quite ill and shattered, crushed not only by the weight of fatigue but by the stifling, moist atmosphere and the foul odor of excrement....There was no latrine, no provision....On top of everything else, a lot of people had vomited on the floor. We were to live for days on end breathing those foul smells, and soon we lived in the foulness itself (Kessel, 50-51).

Everybody in the block had typhus...it came to Belsen Bergen in its most violent, most painful, deadliest form. The diarrhea caused by it became uncontrollable. It flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and mixed with blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor of the barracks (Perl, 171).

The latrines were a spectacle unto themselves:

There was one latrine for thirty to thirty two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on these planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another (Perl, 33).

Prisoners lucky enough to work in one of the camp hospitals, therefore able to enjoy some measure of privacy, were not thereby exempt from the latrine's special horror:

"I had to step into human excreta, into urine soaked with blood, into stools of patients suffering from highly contagious diseases. Only then could one reach the hole, surrounded by the most inexpressible dirt" (Weiss,69). The new prisoner's initiation into camp life was complete when he "realized that there was no toilet paper"---

The fact is that prisoners were systematically subjected to filth They were the deliberate target of excremental assault. Defilement was a constant threat, a condition of life from day to day, and at any moment it was liable to take abruptly vicious and sometimes fatal forms. The favorite pastime of one Kapo was to stop prisoners just before they reached the latrine. He would force an inmate to stand at attention for questioning; them make him "squat in deep knee-bends until the poor man could no longer control his sphincter and "exploded", then beat him; and only then, "covered with his own excrement, the victim would be allowed to drag himself to the latrine" (Donat, 178). In another instance, prisoners were forced to lie in rows on the ground, and each man, when he was finally allowed to get up, "had to urinate across the heads of the others"; and there was "one night when they refined their treatment by making each man urinate into another's mouth" (Wells, 91.)

In Birkenau, soup bowls were periodically taken from the prisoners and thrown into the latrine, from which they had to be retrieved: "When you put it to your lips for the first time, you smell nothing suspicious. Other pairs of hands trembling with impatience wait for it, they seize it the moment you have finished drinking: Only later, much later, does a repelling odor hit your nostrils." (Szmaglewska 154)

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/18/2005 02:09:00 PM |

For those who would consider burning the red white and blue. I would not recommend coming into Nebraska, Wyoming, or Colorado and doing the same. It will get your ass kicked real bad. Even the anti-gay protesters in Laramie Wyo. were not in trouble until they burned a flag. I suspect that they will never come back. I also suspect that they left stuff behind in their hurry to get the hell out of town.

In Texas deadly force is justifiable if used to prevent commission of arson, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated robbery, aggravated sexual assault and other crimes.

That said don't mess with TX or my flag liberal dirtbags.

If its there right to burn the flag, then its your right to have a super soaker full of gasoline to douse them with when they attempt to light it. Its your right ot protect the country from all enemys foreign and DOMESTIC.

Burning the flag is the ultimate free speech but I'd like to beat anyone who does it with a baseball bat !

Tell me why we're wasting time on this issue when thousands and thousands of Mexicans will illegally immigrate into America in the next year?

Maybe we are going at it all wrong. How about we start burning the Mexican flag? When an uproar over that ensues, and people try to stop that, and protect the Mexican flag, then we protect the US flag as well.

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/14/2005 10:44:00 PM |

Game producers had balked at providing residuals, arguing that people don't buy games because of the actors who appear in them.

Obviously, the actors are a factor in the sales of a game. If not, the employers would just grab a delivery boy, give him fifty dollars and stick him in front of a microphone. That they pay to get accomplished actors is proof that it does make a difference.

And with you through it all is the reassuringly cocky voice of our hero, Garrett, given life by Stephen Russell. In addition to the previous Thief entries, Russell's voice can be found in the classics like System Shock 2 and Arx Fatalis, and more recently in the Neverwinter Nights expansion, Shadows of Undrentide.

Special mention must be made of the voices -- all of them are brilliant, especially Stephen Russell, whose voice so embodies world-weary character of Garrett that it's virtually impossible to imagine anybody else in the role.

Fans of the series will instantly recognize Stephen Russell, who returns to provide the unmistakable voice of Garrett. Additionally, a number of other voice actors from previous Thief games again put in excellent performances. On the other hand, some of the voice-over, such as that used for some of the civilians who are walking the streets of The City, isn't nearly up to the same level of quality.

Actor Stephen Russell plays Garrett—and about nine million other tiny roles in the Thief games—and he's so good that you simply couldn't imagine the character sounding like anyone else. It goes without saying by this point that Garrett is a complicated fellow, and a lot of his personality must be conveyed in how he says things. Sarcastic, dry, slightly amused, but with a sharp edge warning of a capability for shocking violence, Russell's portrayal of Garrett is spot-on. Listening to actors like [Terri] Brosius and Russell leaves limited sympathy for developers that cut costs by stuffing janitors and interns in the sound studio and handing them a script.

- posted by Don Porges @ 6/12/2005 11:40:00 AM |