February 22, 2018

At the Happy Face Café...

IMG_1891

... you can talk about whatever you like.

And please consider using the Althouse Portal to Amazon when you've got some on-line shopping to do.

59 comments:

MaxedOutMama said...

Meade?

tcrosse said...

I spent three years in the UK during the Cold War, and returned to the US in 1971. A bunch of us landed at McGuire and took a shuttle into the Philly Navy Base. It was thn for the first time we saw Smiley Faces everywhere. I asked the van-driver what that was about.
Damned if I know, he said.

Mark said...

They are showing way too many of these crap new events, like short track speed skating, which is really rather boring. It would be nice to see real speed skating.

Jersey Fled said...

I haven't watched one second of the Olympics so far. Just completely lost interest.

I think it started with Bob Costas.

SteveBrooklineMA said...

Has anyone seen this article? It introduces us to a few of the Russians whom Mueller has indicted.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5410053/Married-Russian-troll-team-created-fake-personas.html

I started laughing at “accused of creating some memes” and found it difficult to stop. I think it makes the indictment look pathetic and embarrassing.

bagoh20 said...

Russian memes are the most dangerous kind - a whole nother level of bad - Russian bad.

I have been playing a game where I turn on MSNBC at various times and see how long it takes them to say "Russian". It's usually only seconds. It's been that way for a year now.

bagoh20 said...

As Obama once joked (he's a funny guy, you know) "the 1080's called, and they want their foreign policy back." Hilarious!

paminwi said...

So......the armed police officer at Parkland school waited outside for approximately 4 minutes while hearing gunshots. The Sherriff knew this yesterday before that ridiculous CNN Town Hall and still berated Dana Loesch about the NRA. Israel suspended the deputy first thing this morning but the deputy resigned. What a cluster duck all around by the governmental entities that are supposed to "protect and serve"! And they want us to give up our guns? No way, no how!

bagoh20 said...

I believe that the tree scars in the photo are a result of an infestation of the smiley face wood worm, an invasive species brought to our shores by... RUSSIANS!

bagoh20 said...

Ha, I wrote "1080's". Yep, they were at it even back then. Saw it on the History Channel.

Tank said...

Saw NYTs Friedman on CNN.

He is insane.

Or a moron.

Delusional.

WK said...

I assumed the reference to the 1080s related to the struggles between Henry IV and Gregory VII. Really brings back memories.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

I don't think that's what Bob Ross had in mind.

gspencer said...

Suggestion for a blog post on the security guard who was right there at the school but outside and who knew there was a killer inside but who refused to go in and protect the children.

Guess he thought he job was to put in the requisite number of years and get his pension. The idea that he was actually being paid to serve and protect apparently never crossed his mind.

walter said...

Stumped.

Original Mike said...

Anyone who wants to see insane should read William Galston’s piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. If Trump doesn’t denounce the Russians over this existential threat to our democracy, Pence and the cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office.

Oh, and Mattis, Tillerson, and McMaster should confront Trump and “inform him that unless he publicly affirms the reality of the Russian threat and authorizes the strongest possible response to it,they will have no honorable alternative to resignation.”

Gahrie said...

Suggestion for a blog post on the security guard who was right there at the school but outside and who knew there was a killer inside but who refused to go in and protect the children.

Guess he thought he job was to put in the requisite number of years and get his pension. The idea that he was actually being paid to serve and protect apparently never crossed his mind.


At least he was smart enough to resign....of course now the sheriff is giving him more armed security than he ever gave those kids.

The take away from this tragedy is not that we need to confiscate and control guns...it is that the government will fail you in the end and you need to be prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Etienne said...

The funny thing is, that no one cared about the Internet 30 years ago. I was still on CompuServe and that was good enough for me.

I remember getting my first 9600 Baud modem and thinking "Holy Cow, look at that speed!"

Do we really need pictures, sound, and video. I wonder...

WK said...

Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981)
Seems like there is no requirement to protect.

Enlighten-NewJersey said...

Want a good laugh, check out the pictures of Justin Trudeau and family while in India. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5421779/Justin-Trudeau-ridiculed-Indians-fake-outfits.html

WK said...

I seem to recall being on Compuserve 90s and getting a cd-rom that had images and content so it didn’t all have to be download at 9600 baud.

Etienne - I was working for Sun Microsystems in the mid 90s and Compuserve was a customer. Took them to a corporate visit and met with Scott McNealy and he told them that their business model of trying to provide and control content was going into to be killed by the internet. Good enough for free was going to beat their paid and controlled content model. They didn’t buy much after that but weren’t long in business. Scott was pretty direct with people and his opinions.

Sebastian said...

Talk about whatever I want? really?

Anyway, I noticed Michelle Dulak Thomson in the other thread. I'd rather hear her talk about music. Any music--any real music.

How about the use of the oboe in Bach's cantatas?

bagoh20 said...

"Assault style" rifles are the least likely weapon used to kill today. An average of 18 deaths per year. Only cooked pasta is less dangerous. Knives are used 100 times as often (over 1800 deaths). Every single home has an array of knives within reach of children, a home invader, or a pissed-off spouse 24/7 with no locks, no regulations, no permits, and no background checks. WTF is wrong with you crazy knife lovers? Is it really worth the risk? Well, is it punk?

buwaya said...

The Muslims were being tedious in the 1080's.
Among other things the Almoravid (the ISIS of the day) invasion of Spain in 1086.

Whats new?

Lewis Wetzel said...

Tonight I thought about what it means to be mortal. I had always thought that it meant that you knew that you would die someday.
My answering machine was almost full so I was replaying & erasing the old messages. I heard a short message from a close friend who died six months ago.
Now I think that being mortal means that you have to bear the loss of others. It is certain that you will never hear their voice again in this world.

bagoh20 said...

I was on CompuServe too when the internet was just in diapers. About all we could do in the beginning was access the Santa Monica public library card catalog. You would type in a search string and wait for minutes for a short text response of maybe a couple dozen characters. I would type in my search, and then go make breakfast while the cursor blinked working on an answer, and that was with no competition for bandwidth. What a change we have lived through!

Etienne said...

CompuServe had Forums back then. I remember one about C Language and one for Dr. Dobb's computer magazine "Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia".

I remember they had this liberal writer from Berkeley and he drove me nuts. So even then, those types climbed out of their swamps.

Big Mike said...

@Etienne, “running light without overbyte.” I remember it, too!

Bay Area Guy said...

I have a pal who spent 25 years in the FBI - Counter Intelligence. Knows all that FISA bullshit, backwards and forwards.

I have another pal who served many years in the DOJ. Knows how to try a case, backwards and forwards.

I asked each one, independently, "What does it mean to indict 13 Russian citizens who live in Russia?"

They each said, in essence, it means there will never be a trial and Mueller is grandstanding.

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Compuserve, Schompuserve. USENET was the place.

Still is for the few, the proud, the aged..

Sebastian said...

"there will never be a trial and Mueller is grandstanding."

But grandstanding to keep the investigation going, and hurt Trump as much as possible even though Mueller's got nothing, or grandstanding to puff himself up and ease the inevitable deflation as he shuts things down and progs realize and get infuriated that he got nothing?

Paul Zrimsek said...

"the 1080's called, and they want their foreign policy back."

William the Undocumented and his Norman DREAMers, doing the jobs Anglo-Saxons wouldn't do.

Etienne said...

Yep, I was on Usenet also when I was working on my Masters at OU. We had a PDP-11/73 that ran Berkeley Unix 2.9 and connected to the University of Illinois every 15 minutes with uucp. It was the big hub. I think the computer name was ihnp4 or some such. Anyway, it sucked down all the news.

I remember we had a $10 lab fee per semester. Outrageous! ha.

Etienne said...

oops, no. ihnp4 was Bell labs... I just looked it up. You can find anything on Google... The first thing to go is your eyesight, and I can't remember the second thing...

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Wow. ihnp4, *there's* a name to conjure with.

We upgraded our PDP-11/44 from V7M (straight Bell V7 with some Dec flavor) to 2.9BSD, but we ran the USENET feed (and our UUCP mail) on a Vax 11-780 running pure 4.2BSD. We had a bit of panic when we couldn't boot it initially and thought we might be forced to run VMS. We had various schemes to send mail with roundabout routings to force remote sites to dial us rather than vice-versa since we had no budget for long distance modem connections.

n.n said...

The Muslims were being tedious in the 1080's... invasion of Spain in 1086.

Today, they are honored guests of the very people, and conspirators, who opened abortion fields and forced CAIR in their homelands in a social justice adventure (i.e. elective conflict).

Mark said...

The funny thing is, that no one cared about the Internet 30 years ago. I was still on CompuServe and that was good enough for me.

The lawyers here should appreciate being on subscription-based dial-up Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw back in the day, with their early search engines and vast data bases. When the Internet began and grew up, like IBM to Microsoft, they stuck to their old ways, rather than seeing the future.

Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw were primed to be and could have been -- should have been -- Google and Facebook before Google and Facebook were, but they weren't. All due to short-sighted mismanagement.

Churchy LaFemme: said...

Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw were primed to be and could have been -- should have been -- Google and Facebook before Google and Facebook were, but they weren't. All due to short-sighted mismanagement.

Well, you can kind of forgive them because they thought they were in a different business. It's harder to figure out what the heck Yahoo and AltaVista were thinking. They *knew* they were internet search businesses and still blew it.

Danno said...

Blogger bagoh20 said...Ha, I wrote "1080's". Yep, they were at it even back then. Saw it on the History Channel.


Kind of reminded me of the lyrics I heard on a song the other day, "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel"

From the Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k

Yancey Ward said...

The police are not out there to protect you. They are there, at best, to catch the guy who shoots you, or stabs you, and often not even that.

I don't blame people who don't conceal carry, but if you get shot in a public place by a maniac, it is part of the price for not doing so. Same goes for your home. It does no good to criticize someone for not risking their lives to save your own, and I don't give a shit if it is part of their job description.

Clyde said...

From that angle, it's a smiley face; look at it from the 1 o'clock position and it's a phallus.

Clyde said...

I've cracked the code on yesterday's fashion show post. The snake is the tell. It's a mimic, whose coloration is similar to the venomous coral snake, and says "leave me alone". The clothes mimicked something a crazy person would wear. If you're walking the streets of New York or San Francisco and want the bums, panhandlers, weirdos and freaks to leave you alone, what would work better?

rhhardin said...

The ihnp in ihnp4 is Indian Hill, Naperville IL.

rhhardin said...

Puerto Rico NEXRAD weather radar is still "down for maintenance" after the hurricane.

Its final image showed a hurricane approaching.

Humperdink said...

Since Obama, "The 1040's called and they want their IRS back".

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I just read this Twitter thread OMG.

https://twitter.com/thelastrefuge2/status/966854507744374784

TV show The Wire predicted Parkland.

https://youtu.be/BoiJRKwiC1Y

Reminiscent of Baltimore’s ‘room to destroy’.

Freeman Hunt said...

Is that terrifying to other trees? "They killed Roger and carved a picture of a smiling face into his corpse!"

AllenS said...

LOL, Freeman!

gilbar said...

"their business model of trying to provide and control content"

isn't that facebook's model now?

tim in vermont said...

Remember when they blamed an artist for Bengazi and chucked him in prison on a pretext? Speech is in danger, and it ain't Trump behind it.

Fernandinande said...

Billy Graham-Richard Nixon tapes:

Graham made some rather silly (sort of) anti-semitic remarks then lied about it. But it was on tape.

Ann Althouse said...

"'the 1080's called, and they want their foreign policy back.' William the Undocumented and his Norman DREAMers, doing the jobs Anglo-Saxons wouldn't do."

LOL.

Jersey Fled said...

My brother in law served as a police officer for 30 years. I have no doubt that he would have been in that school by the time the second shot was fired.

Along the same lines, imagine this was an Israeli school and an Israeli police officer. There is one in every Israeli school with more than 100 students. We'll armed and we'll trained.

The problem was this particular officer in this particular police department in this particular school.

Hagar said...

I read one post that said the deputy arrived at the other end of the school. If that was the case, 4 minutes is not very long, and it is not unreasonable that it would take him that long or longer to figure out what was happening and where.
The sheriff's statement was in any case quite inappropriate; part of his job is to stand up for his men, but this guy threw his deputy under the bus immediately, before any of this mess had been sorted out, and the media took it and ran with it.

mockturtle said...

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

SeanF said...

Yancey Ward: The police are not out there to protect you. They are there, at best, to catch the guy who shoots you, or stabs you, and often not even that.

I read somewhere, don't remember where, that the real reason we have a law enforcement system is not to protect us from criminals, but rather to protect criminals from us.

A person who likes to break into houses and steal things will, before too long, end up in jail. If there were no law enforcement, that person would, before too long, end up dead. And it probably wouldn't be as long.

Gahrie said...

I read one post that said the deputy arrived at the other end of the school.

He was in a building on campus when the shooting began, moved to the building where the shooting was happening, and waited outside until the shooting stopped. It was all caught on camera.

readering said...

Interesting letter from Susan Rice's counsel to Senators heading Judiciary Committee and Crime/Terrorism subcommittee on her 1/20/17 memo to the file. Prepared at request of White House Counsel at first available opportunity during busy two weeks. Looks like it's another nothing burger. No discussion of Steele stuff at that 1/5/17 meeting. Rice never briefed on FBI investigations or FISA applications relating to Trump campaign.

Mark said...

Judging from the bark, I'd guess the tree was an ash.

Hope it didn't make an ash of itself.