This Just In

A chimp is not a person, Austria's Supreme Court has ruled.

Insert punchline here.

Ethanol - the Miracle Fuel

I'm finally starting to understand the appeal of ethanol. It's a new, improved way for the rich and well-connected to tap into government treasuries. Let's see....

The feds give you a grant to help build the plant, then both the feds and your friendly state governments subsidize people's purchase of the fuel. It (debatedly) takes more energy to make than it provides, and we conveniently bar foreign sources. What a great fuel! Wish I was a former university basketball coach, state official, or just a plain old millionaire.....I'd be bellying up to the trough myself.

A victory for free speech

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on his campus.....and then nailed his ignorant ass to the wall.

That's the way we do it in a democracy, Mahmoud.

Updating links

I've owed the Quincy Pundit a link for months now....my apologies.

Guess I'll link this Provine blog to see if it holds up.

Thought for a moment that the Quincy Pilgrim had stirred back to life.....but maybe that was only the corpse releasing gas.

Quincy Dump and Obviously Quincy appear to have gone belly up.

Cute Headline

"Kohl's puts best food forward at event".....nice. The Whig should do more of those, especially on inconsequential stories like this one. A little wit never killed anybody.

I may have to reconsider my extreme skepticism of the hydroelectric plant idea after reading how electric companies around the region are interested in the electricity that might be generated by such operations. At first it seemed like a complete pie-in-the-sky idea to me. Of course, finding the $180 million to build the thing might be a stumbling block, since I doubt if Quincy could bond that kind of money; and besides, estimated figures are always low. That leaves state or federal grants--and by 2013 the state's financial train wreck should be well under way.

Those Doggone Spawls

Whatever they are.

They found a few of them on the Bayview Bridge. Don't you just hate that when you're looking for your spawl and it's gone off to visit West Quincy?

Might have wanted to use a more common word, or define the thing.

Gotta go, my spawl needs to be let out.

Maybe it's just me.....

But it kind of gives me the creeps to see athletes described as "twin towers" these days. Especially at this time of year.

Comics

I had occasion today to look at the comics page of the Louisville Courier-Journal, which used to be one of the great regional newspapers in the country. I noticed that more of the comics were by dead people than by living ones:

Blondie
Peanuts
Rex Morgan
Wizard of Id
Apt. 3-G
Dennis the Menace
B.C.

And sure, Mort Walker's still "supervising" Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois, but really now....he's 84 years old.

And newspaper people wonder why young folks think that newspapers are irrelevant.

Independent

That's not such a hard word to spell, is it? Just remember that it's all "e"s after the first I. Independent. Lovely word.

Words I dislike

"Signage."

What's wrong with "signs"?

Also, I thought city officials' description of Jeffrey Jansen, owner of Maine Street Tap, as "being sought" was a bit loaded. Usually when someone is "being sought," the implication is that the police are looking for him. In this case, they're just "trying to get in touch with him," as the story makes clear in paragraph 6.

Limited Success

Nice to see that affirmative action really works......

"Freshmen and sophomores take ACT prep tests, and juniors take a mirror ACT to help them prepare."

Oh wait, that was the other front page story about how extra effort devoted to young people's success pays off! Never mind!