Tim Blair

Man!! that iron-ore mine is AWESOME!!

Vive la John!

Here’s a Whaleback SUV, with a puny earthling is included at right of shot for scale. Clicky for more.

Are they King Cobras down there or are you just glad to be in Australia?

The mine is quite beautiful.

Toni Collette, oh my..

Is it a prerequisite to be leftwing radical to be in the movie business?

I'm going to try get the number of her manager. I'm outraged, someone needs to tell her to shut the fuck up.

I've been InstaLanched twice over the past week. You can kind of tell when you check out your blog and find 33 comments to something you posted instead of the usual zero.

(From article on Cuban literacy)

In 2000, almost 96 percent of Cubans older than 15 were considered to be literate, according to the CIA World Factbook

It's a bit embarassing that one of America's intelligence agencies repeats bogus statistics from Cuba. Unlike the UN, the CIA is not obliged to avoid upsetting Cuba, though in the CIA's defense, the literacy of Cubans is not the CIA's primary responsibility.

What a brave stand -- she's against strip mining! And they actually used explosives rather than, say, slave labor, to break apart the ore. Hideous!

What a brave stand -- she's against strip mining!

Gee, I wonder how the protest crowd will protest against it. Could it involve nudity?

"perverted and stoatlike"

good one I'll have to remember that

If only I knew what it meant!

Needless to say, Toni never uses or benefits from anything made of iron or steel. Unless it is the result of 100% organic steel production methods of course - just as Mother Nature intended.

From the Cuban Literacy article:

Cuba's free schooling does have one noteworthy feature that rankles the U.S. government: It comes with classroom instruction in communist theory and anti-capitalist viewpoints. There also is intense pressure for teacher and student involvement in non-educational political activities organized by the state.

You don't have to go to Cuba to find that.

Hey. We've got real public education problems here in the Detroit area. It appears that only about 1/3 of Detroiters are functionally literate. I've got an idea for some synergism.

We want Castro out of Cuba and better education in Detroit. How about we *give* Detroit to Castro (pay him well enough to leave Cuba), build a fence bigger than the Israeli's around it, give them *twice* as much money for education as in Cuba, force the current education establishment in Detroit to stay, and let Castro run the whole thing until the literacy rate hits, say, 90%, then pension the old, bearded bastard off (shouldn't take more than a couple of decades and he should be really tired by then).

We save money (Detroit currently gets about $7000 per student, not counting special ed, which I don't find in Cuba -- evidently they don't need it, I figure twice Cuba's rate would amount to about $100 per student, not counting monthly allotments of sugar, coffee, meat, oil, etc, plus we don't need to buy any new books or hardly any supplies at all). We could easily save billions over the next two decades, which could be used in other areas.

Castro gets to prove his methods work even in a capitalist country (well, provided we work out some sort of "wet-foot/dry-foot policy for potential escapees). He gets total control (plenty of jails in Detroit). The rest of Wayne County and Michigan get to prove whether or not they really can manage without Detroit. Several very annoying US Reps are now in the Castro Detroit rubberstamp parliament. They can build a vacation spot for Canadians along the St.Clair River and Belle Isle so the Canucks can drive to enjoy the fruits of Soviet-style Communism.

What's not to like? This answers so many problems.

Enjoyed the story of man with snakes.

I want to know what sort of containers you could put those snakes in and strap to your legs? Must have been very awkward walking.

Nifty headline, "Creature Thought Extinct Found in Cuba" but a niftier first sentence, "A living example of an insectivore native to Cuba — but believed for years to extinct..." Turns out when they say "believed for years to [be] extinct they only meant four years, since the last sighting was in 1999.

A living example of an insectivore native to Cuba -- but believed, for a couple of years, to be extinct....
There, that's better.

Kal

"Creature Thought Extinct Found in Cuba" - I thought this was going to be a story about unreconstructed Stalinists.

Hamas, the beer refreshing!

Hamas, the beer refreshing!

Hamaaaaaas!

"But isn't it fabulous that we are all so different and strong in our convictions - it helps makes the world go round."

I've always wondered why the earth spins. It takes an actress I've never heard of to tell me. Boy, I must be dumb.

Right now I love John Howard, I want more high-level french-bashing. I wonder if we can get Downer to say the french "are a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkies"?

That a pretty lame beer heist. Check out how the real professionals do it:
Korean Tunnel

(Scroll to the bottom of page)

Toni Colette an actress?

All the personality and presence of a slater.

And I don't mean the no-win no-fee ambulance-chasing Labor lawyer.