Maybe Dorothy Didn't Know Kansas As Well As She Thought...

Things like this (via Unfogged via Metafilter etc, and a few months old) give me hope:

Office of the Mayor, Lawrence, Kansas

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and
WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zürich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Heulsenbeck; and
WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and
WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and
WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis “Boog” Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as “INTERNATIONAL DADAISM MONTH”
and I encourage all citizens
Dennis “Boog” Highberger
December 27, 2005

I find George Galloway's purported livejournal funny: you may differ. (Via Harry's Place)

Oh, and over on the Fafblog Giblets tells us the seven species of conifer he can never forgive, including The Bristlecone Pine for lying in wait to ambush Giblets for four thousand years and The Western Prickly Juniper for double-crossing Giblets, stranding him in Bangkok and handing over the emerald spider to Alfonse LaFarge and his cabal of undead ninja assassins, not to mention Fafnir's minutes of the desert island sub-committee on whether or not to eat the coconut. (good thing I caught the rather Freudian set of typos on that last word before posting...). And checking back through the archive for the first time in a while I see I missed The Challenge of Soup in a post-9/11 World

I am resisting the temptation to write about Jowell, Mills & Berlusconi. Suffice it to say that leaving aside entirely the political angle, the setup blatantly smells to me like, at best and stretching credibility somewhat, legitimate tax avoidance but quite possibly slipping over into evasion, and also quite possibly money laundering. The only point I can see in their favour at present is the thought "but if so, it's so blatant". Yet we're expected to believe Jowell, in September 2000, not only was so naive as to become the cliche of the woman who happily signs a joint mortgage without thinking about it when her husband asks (a cliche that has given rise to a number of leading cases) but with her husband was actually able to obtain a loan of £400,000 from Hambros without them insisting she took full independent advice to protect their security from a charge of undue influence, at a time when Etridge No 2 was trundling towards the Lords and some years after Barclays Bank v. O'Brien. And then they pay the lot off just over two months later... Just a coincidence, and a chance gift, she says. Now what was that phone number again...

ETA: (for reference) Actually Exists has a good summary of what Mills actually seems to have done.

This, Or That

From yesterday's Snowmail:

The Taliban are alive and well and still oppressing people in Afghanistan no matter what the British or Afghan governments might claim and tonight we'll show you the proof in the form of one incident caught on camera.

It all takes place in wilds of Helmand province - where thousands of British troops are being deployed to try to bring order and tackle the poppy fields. The Taliban in Helmand have been waging a campaign against education - burning schools, attacking teachers, terrorising all concerned.

An independent team working for Channel 4 News in Helmand got a tip off that such an attack was underway and went to film it in progress as a group of Taliban set fire to a school. Incidentally it is worth mentioning the Taliban were clearly Afghans and not foreigners from Pakistan as is often claimed by President Karzai.

While our team were filming the Taliban attack a group of Afghan armed police arrived to defend the school. Chaos ensued in which most of the Taliban got away, our team got beaten up and the school got burned. And this is the chaos our soldiers are walking into.

On the BBC website now:

Bush praises Afghanistan progress

US President George W Bush has praised the progress of Afghan democracy on his first visit to the country, where the US helped eject the Taleban in 2001.

On a surprise first stop of his maiden trip to South Asia, Mr Bush told Afghan President Hamid Karzai his country was "inspiring others".