IT’S PARTY TIME WITH DESKTOP KARAOKE
A friend of mine was recently tasked to provide the entertainment for a conference, and on a tiny budget. He first thought of karaoke.
Karaoke bars are big business, and people love to ham it up in front of the screen. You don't have to come up with lame or insulting wisecracks to get people into a fun mood, and there are lots of party games you can come up with using the music and lyrics.
That's what my friend wanted for his party: people singing and dancing, having a grand old time - with him as the star for having come up with it.
The only problem - the budget! Until now, my friend would've had to go out and hire someone with an elaborate and expensive karaoke set-up to come out and run it - putting the idea of a karaoke party out of reach for him, as it is for so many others.
Until now, that is.
SOMEONE SHOULD TELL THE U.S. GOVERNMENT: IRAN IS AT WAR WITH US
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dying of cancer. But he is convinced that his legacy will be glorious. He believes that thousands of his Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers effectively control southern Iraq, and that the rest of the country is at his mercy, since we present no challenge to them - even along the Iraq/Iran border, where they operate with impunity.
They calmly plan their next major assault without having to worry about American retribution. The mullahs have thousands of intelligence officers all over Iraq, as well as a hard core of Hezbollah terrorists - including the infamous Imad Mughniyah, arguably the region's most dangerous killer - and they control the major actors, from Zarqawi to Sadr to the Badr Brigades.
Khamenei and his top cronies believe they have effectively won. They think the U.S. is politically paralyzed, thanks to the relentless attacks of President Bush's Democrat opponents and the five-year long internal debate about Iran policy.ALL FOUR STANZAS
[One year before his passing, in 1991, famed science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote the following essay on America's national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. Thanks to TTP members Bill and Carole Gregory who brought it to our attention, we can share it with you. It seems particularly apt, given our country's many current travails. ---JW]
I have a weakness -- I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.
The words are difficult and the tune is almost impossible, but frequently when I'm taking a shower I sing it with as much power and emotion as I can. It shakes me up every time. I was once asked to speak at a luncheon. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing our national anthem -- all four stanzas.
This was greeted with loud groans. One man closed the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud and distracting. "Thanks, Herb," I said. "That's all right," he said. "It was at the request of the kitchen staff."
I explained the background of the anthem and then sang all four stanzas.
Let me tell you, those people had never heard it before--or had never really listened. I got a standing ovation. But it was not me; it was the anthem. So now let me tell you how it came to be written.
THE SECOND CIVIL WAR
Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced he would schedule a vote in the Senate for a proposed Constitutional Amendment with the following wording:
The Congress and the States shall have Power to Prohibit the Physical Desecration of the Flag of the United States.
Such an amendment (it was passed by the House last June) would override Supreme Court decisions in 1989/90 proclaiming burning the American flag was a form of constitutionally protected free speech.
Yet just as yelling fire! in a theatre is not protected free speech, neither should burning an American flag, for it is a purposeful incitement to violence. Thus such an "anti-flag burning amendment" would be welcome.
Yet in truth, only the tiniest fraction of Americans have any desire to burn their country's flag. There is, however, another country's flag that millions of Americans feel like burning right now: the flag of Mexico.ILLEGALS AND SENATORS ON ONE SIDE, VOTERS ON THE OTHER
It is lucky America has more than two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season.
The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary Committeemen - and probably a majority of the Senate - are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them.
The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus.
But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally kick their regrettable backsides out of town). It was gut-wrenching to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country. I guess ignorance loves company.
MY MARCH MADNESS
I don't know when the term "March Madness" regarding the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship came into usage, but it was well after my college days in the 1960s. This year's madness is focused on the sympathetic favorite, George Mason, and the nostalgic favorite, UCLA. It certainly has caused me to recall a March Madness of my very own.
The nostalgia is for the greatest achievement in the history of college athletics, Coach John Wooden's 10 NCAA championships in 11 years (1964-75), including seven in a row (1966-73), the NCAA winning-streak record of 88 consecutive victories and 38 straight NCAA tournament victories.
But none of that had happened by Thursday, March 19, 1964. The Bruins, led by center Fred Slaughter and guards Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, were undefeated in the regular season, 30-0, had won the regionals the previous weekend at Corvallis, Oregon, and for the first time in UCLA history, were in the Final Four. UCLA was to play Kansas State in the semi-finals at Kansas City, Missouri tomorrow, Friday, March 20.
And I was bummed.BAGHDAD ISN’T GETTYSBURG
If surgeons wielded scalpels as carelessly as to day's journalists misuse language, the mortality rate in our hospitals would soar. The latest example of this deadly abuse of terminology was the media's declaration of "civil war" in Iraq.
It was the equivalent of describing vandalism as genocide. The blaze faded, only to be reignited briefly by former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's statement last weekend that Iraq was in a civil war - a claim he swiftly retracted, to the disappointment of anchormen and -women everywhere.Perhaps it's time to consider what a civil war actually is.
THE AMAZING MUSICAL MONKEY
1,000 files. 4.5 gigabytes. All in a month.
Numbers like these almost put me in the elite of digital music aficionados. I spent much of a month using one of my favorite programs, Stationripper, reviewed by me last July.
In its free version, Stationripper lets you record 2 Shoutcast MP3 streams at a time. Stationripper is useful because it saves songs downloaded as individual files with their proper names.
It's a great way to build a large music collection in just a few days - and it's all completely legal, as I mentioned recently. Getting music is no longer a problem, and playing it is easy, too.
The only problem is trying to get a handle on my collection. Until recently, all my files were in a few folders; it would have been nice to set up playlists by artists, genres, even albums.
But who has time to figure out what songs go with which albums? And who has time to set up playlists according to mood mixes, artists, music types or whatever?
The Monkey has the time - as well as the ability!CONTEMPT OF TRUTH
My friend Bill Roggio, an Army veteran and Web logger who was embedded with U.S. Marines in Iraq last fall, was a guest this week on a segment of the CNN show "On the Story." The topic was news coverage from Iraq.
"On the Story" gets even lower ratings than the average CNN show, so there's a question of how representative of American public opinion audience reaction is. But before the segment with Bill began, host Ali Velshi conducted a little poll.
"Give me a show of hands if you have confidence in the news coming out of Iraq," Mr. Velshi asked the studio audience. "It looks like about 30 percent of you."
"Let's see a show of hands of those of you who don't have confidence like (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld says," he asked. "That looks like 90 percent of you."
Mr. Roggio responded by giving the media a D+. "Reporting often is inaccurate, usually lacks context, often aids al Qaeda, and is why Americans like those in the audience have been so misinformed."THE FRENCH DISEASE
On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus departed the Spanish port of Palos at the mouth of the Rio Tinto. After discovering islands he named San Salvador (in the Bahamas), Juana (Cuba), and Hispaniola on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, he returned from his epochal voyage, reaching Palos on March 15, 1493. According to the journal of Spanish physician Ruy Diaz de l'Isla, the pilot of Columbus's ship had contracted a previously unknown disease marked by severe fever and frightful skin eruptions.
The pilot wasn't the only one. By the time Columbus reached Barcelona, several of his sailors had come down with this strange new disease and were treated by the mystified Dr. de l'Isla. Unbeknownst to them, the sailors had acquired the disease through cohabitation with infected native "Indian" women on the discovered islands.
Europe had finally begun to recover from the Black Death of the bubonic plague in the middle 1300's, which had killed fully half of all Europeans. Once again, Europe was ravaged by a plague to become known as morbus gallicus, the French Disease. It would kill one third of the entire population of Europe.
Today we are witnessing the effects of another French Disease on the streets of Paris and on the campuses of dozens of universities throughout France. The social disease of the French Anti-Capitalist Welfare State has obviously caused severe brain damage among French students.