Rhinocrisy

Tuesday the 19th of September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The preceding link has some good starting points, but you might want to consult this site for a better guide that includes some nautical terminology as well. A personal favorite innovation of mine, introduced to me by MIT’s Journal of Humor, “Voodoo”^*, is the exclamation “Goo!”. As in:

Cap’n Juggleharness: Goo! Me peg-leg’s caught in this cursed rigging! Don’t raise the yardarm on the mizzen-mast, ye scurvy lubbers!
[ Yardarm is unfortunately raised anyway, taking the good Cap’n with it.]
Cap’n Juggleharness: Waughh!!

Bone up on your lingo. You wouldn’t want to be caught with your pantaloons down ’round your ankles.

I read Chris Hitchen’s 9/11 editorial in the WSJ last night. I realize Hitchens jumped the shark quite a while back, and one really should give very short shrift to everything on the Journal’s editorial page, but I’m continually astounded that people can openly espouse doctrines that should, at least ostensibly, be anathema these days. Here’s his conclusion:

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We”–and our allies–simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future.

This is what happens when you stay up late nights watching “Commando” and “Rambo, First Blood: Part Two” on FX.

Since the Segway was introduced, its makers have been reticent about sales figures. So reticent, that some have speculated they may have been embarrased into silence.^* After all, before the grand rollout on national TV, the company built a New Hampshire factory scaled to produce almost a half-million of the devices a year.

Yesterday the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall of every Segway in the country for a software fix. They had the bad taste to say how many specimens were affected: “about 23,500.”

Let’s see. According to some people on the Internets, annual global bicycle production is about 100 million units. Since a year is about 8,766 hours, that works out to about about 11,400 bikes per hour which means that every two hours, the world builds as many new bikes as Segway has built scooters in almost five years.

Hooray bikes! Boo, $100 million techno fix for a nonexistent problem!^†

^* Segway’s reticence reminds me of this guy talking about the membership of his group which appears likely to stop San Francisco’s bike plan. He won’t reveal the number except to say it’s “more than one.”

^†Speaking of which, when will these guys start spending their billions purifying drinking water for the children of Mexico instead of filling Mexico’s aquifers with rocket fuel for the sake of their phallic overcompensation complexes?