MSNBC remembers.

Includes the great Apple 1984 commercial, which was shown only once.

More photos

Richard Owen (link not working 2/4/06) writes:

Of the Delahayes constructed after the war, this majestic roadster was probably the most epic. Built for the reemerging concours circuit, Saoutchik was responsible for its extreme body which borrowed styling cues from many other earlier cars.

Using the French curves of the thirties with more modern baroque ornamentation, Saoutchik conveys a sense of drama and movement with this design. With completely enclosed wheels, the cars best angle is its profile as the front has a confusing mix of elements that look like they came from different cars. At the time, the aggressive use of chrome was revolutionary and an emerging trend that the American manufacturers would go on to master.

Much of this Delahaye’s beauty is also shown in details such as chrome accents that highlight the curves and feature embedded turn signals or the small strips which flank the side and add a since of speed while hiding the door handles . At the front is a curious nose which was inspired by the Figoni et Falaschi-designed Narval produced just a year earlier. Inside a two tone interior is relentlessly busy and features a medley of designs that work together in their excess.

The car is built upon the first new Delahaye chassis designed after the war. New features for this model included a much larger 4.5 liter engine, a De-Dion rear suspension, Dubbonet front suspension, Lockhead brakes, and notvelties such as a radio and heater came standard. When everything worked, the chassis was superb, but many cars suffered from breakdowns, particularly around the complex suspension and fragile driveline.

The first owner of this car, chassis 815025, was Sir John Gaul of England who brought the car to several European concours, catching the attention of the press and public wherever it went. In 1949, it won top honors at the Grand Castle du Bois de Boulogne in Paris, the Monte Carlo Concours and Coup de l’Automobile in San Remo almost always accompanied by an attractive lady.

By the seventies the roadster had made its way to Colorado where maintenance on the race-spec engine and Dubonnet suspension became a nuisance. The owner then chopped out the entire front section of the chassis to fit a GM Toronado system which was front wheel drive.

For nearly forty years the original engine and car were separated much to the blissfull ignorance of everyone who could still appreciate its distinct design. Eventually all the parts were reunited with a single owner who then took the bold task of refurbishing the massive Delahaye. It made a welcome debut at the 2006 Pebble Beach Concours where it graced the shoreline beside the best examples of the marque.

Bibliography:

Adatto, Richard and Diana Meredith. Delahaye Styling and Design. Dalton Watson Fine books. 2005.
Dorizon, Peigney and JP Dauliac. Delahaye-Le Grande Livre. Paris Editions EPA. 1995.
Renou, Michel. Delahaye-Tout l’historie. Paris Editions EPA. 1994

I was momentarily glancing at the television earlier today. I did not have time to sit and watch a movie, but I happened to catch a few minutes of dialogue from the David O. Selznick-produced 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.

An annoyingly bumptious American is bothering the luminaries in the Divers’ glamorous European circles. Having been rebuffed by the famous composer, he turns to the Mitteleuropa aristocrat, and inquires, “What do you do?”

“I shoot.” the aristocrat curtly replies.

The American smiles. “Anything at all?”

“Lions in Africa; tigers in India; bolsheviks in Europe.”

“Haven’t you any ambition to do anything more serious?” the American sneers.

“I’m planning to restore the Holy Roman Empire.” comes the response.

Byron York identifies the basis for two of five counts of Patrick Fitzgerald’s charges against former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

Two of the five felony counts in the perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are based entirely on a single phone conversation Libby had with Matthew Cooper, then a White House correspondent for Time magazine, on July 12, 2003. In federal court in Washington Wednesday, CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed his documentary evidence to support those charges — one count of perjury and one count of making false statements — and the evidence was this:

had somethine and about the wilson thing and not sure if it’s ever

The Master of Calhoun was filled with indignation when a showering couple’s private activities flooded one of the college bathrooms, and is demanding that undergraduate aqueous trysts cease in Calhoun forthwith. Fiercely fueled with righteous wrath, he proceeded to bombard the residential college’s entire undergraduate population with an angry email, which was promptly leaked to the AP:

A randy couple’s frolic in a shower at one of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges prompted a professor to issue an e-mail of protest, which in turn has sparked debate on the Internet.

Yale officials told The Associated Press on Friday that the e-mail was sent Jan. 30 by Professor Jonathan Holloway, master of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges at the Ivy League university.

About 330 students received the e-mail from Holloway, who runs Calhoun as master. He referred comment to Yale’s public affairs department.

His e-mail warns against “intimate activity” in the showers, “especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygienic state.

“Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall,” the e-mail stated, referring to the nickname for college residents. “Last night, the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasurable and exciting for you, but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.”

The note, first reported Friday by the New Haven Register, ended with a warning to the frolicking couple: “I really don’t want to explore this matter any further, as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let’s not go there.”

What does he mean by threatening public embarassment, do you suppose? Email number 2 names names? Email number 3 includes .jpg’s?

Dan Gelertner ’09 thinks there’s trouble right here in Elm City. His fellow Calhoun undergraduates are sinking into the depths of degradation.

Maybe he could start a boys’ band.

I can remember some sophomores from Calhoun (I think it was) being expelled back in the 1960s as the result of being caught showering with a date. But in the early 1970s, Yale bathroom doors often featured interchangeable signs, reading “Male Inside,” “Female Inside,” or “Couple Inside.” I don’t remember any couples causing a flood, however. What could they possibly have been doing?

The 2007 Calhoun Shower Scandal is pretty tame stuff, I can tell you, compared to great Yale sex scandals of days gone by. Older Yalemen will remember the “Calhoun Suzy” affair of the late 1950s? early 1960s? in which a very naughty, and decidedly underage, townie took up residence in the then-uncoeducated residential college, providing horizontal refreshment to large numbers of undergraduates. The Suzy story ended unhappily with the arrival of the New Haven police, and the premature termination of some promising Yale careers.

Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network hired New York guerilla marketeer Interference, Inc. to promote the film spinoff of a new late night cartoon program Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a cartoon series running since December of 2000 about the adventures of three anthropomorphic fast food items living in New Jersey.

Interference arranged to plant LED images of two Mooninites (secondary character adversaries of the show’s heroes) around Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco and Philadelphia to publicize the film.

Other cities shrugged off the Mooninite threat, but Boston officials first took two weeks to notice the signs, then panicked, halting highway, bridge, and river traffic, closing down Boston University, having the bomb squad detonate a sign, and overall spending half a million dollars on this nonsense.

Video: How to Shut Down Boston

Boston is charging the freelance artists who erected the signs with a newly defined crime of placing a hoax device which causes panic. Mark Frauenfelder get it right:

the ones to blame are the Boston city officials, whose astoundingly incompetent response to the report of a suspicious device triggered the panic. The people of Boston should be clamoring for the resignation of the mayor and the head of the department of security for being the only city in the ten-city ad campaign that didn’t notice the signs hanging in plain sight for two full weeks and then misidentifying them in a way that caused widespread panic.

Now these shamefaced bureaucrats are rounding up scapegoats and asking Turner to pay for the damages caused by their own ineptitude. Talk about a hoax.

NYM awards Boston the 2007 Mayor Ray Nagin Prize for municipal incompetence combined with pomposity.

Neo-Neocon, blogging at PJM, considers Suicide, Homicide, Terrorism and Romanticism, concluding that “Romanticism has found a cozy home on the Left. Toss in a soupçon of “sympathetic vibration with the anger of the suicide/homicide bomber,” and disaster follows. It’s all part of a long tradition whose end is in sight.”

The anger on the Left is more visible right now, fanned by the flames of frustration at being at last in power, but still not in control. That feeling had its roots in the continuing sense that the Left’s fell out of power in the first place as a result of election fraud. It’s not necessary that this perception be correct to be a powerful motivator; just that it be perceived as correct by those who believe it.

Some—although not all—of those on the Left who sport this anger feel an added sympathetic vibration with the anger of the suicide/homicide bomber. The Romantic glorification of the downtrodden Third World by the Left adds to that sympathy and gives it further political underpinnings.

There’s an interesting socioeconomic trend to Romanticism: it’s a philosophy that seems to attract a surprising number of the more well-to-do and well-educated. In Arab countries terrorists are at least as likely to come from the ranks of the relatively affluent as they are to be poverty-stricken. And in the West it seems to be the relatively well-to-do these days who are influenced most strongly by Romanticism.

Perhaps ‘twas ever thus. Romanticism—here and elsewhere—is not only fueled by the guilt sometimes felt by people who have relative plenty when others are suffering, but it’s also fostered by an educational system that teaches and glorifies Romanticism in ways both subtle and overt.

So guilt and education are part of it. But there are other ways in which affluence—at least, relative affluence—feeds into Romanticism, especially in this country. Romanticism is idealistic (I would say, naively so). Belief in Romanticism in its purest and most philosophical form requires a certain remove from the struggles of day-to-day existence only available to those not on a subsistence level (see here for a more in-depth discussion of how this might work).

The affluent may also be attracted to the intensity of feeling and experience of the terrorist and the suicide bomber for another reason. Many human beings are probably hard-wired to seek excitement. Those who are no longer engaged in an obvious struggle for existence—no lion hunts, for example—can sometimes feel a sense of ennui and a lack of thrills. Filling this need can take the form of seeking out extreme sports such as skydiving or auto racing, or by high-risk behavior such as gambling or taking drugs. But for some people the quest takes the form of an urge towards nihilism.

As for the Middle East, the influence of the West and of Romanticism—both the homegrown and the grafted variety—have never been absent from the modern Arab scene. From T.E. Lawrence to the Nazis (see Bernard Lewis’s book Semites and Anti-Semites) to the present-day Leftists, Romanticism seems to have blended in well with the pre-existing ethos of the area.

Romanticism and politics make strange bedfellows. They lead inexorably from a philosophy that celebrates nature and considers humankind to be essentially good to one that glorifies murder and rage. But whoever said people were rational? Certainly not the Romantics.

Read the whole thing.

Harvard Physics Assistant Professor LuboÅ¡ Motl, at his blog The Reference Frame, comments on today’s release of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Summary for Policymakers.

climate scientists have improved the scientific method. In the past, scientists had to do their research before the implications for policymaking could have been derived from this research. It was very slow and inefficient. Who would like to wait for those slow scientists when all of us know from the media by now that the burning Earth is already evaporating? ;-)

Today, the vastly superior postmodern scientific method of the IPCC members allows them to publish the summary for policymakers first. As they told us, the technical justification – the scientific work itself – will be adjusted to agree with whatever conclusions for policymaking we hear today. The scientific report of the first working group will be released in May, more than 3 months into the future. We will (then) be able to compare how it differs from the draft.

Bill Kristol, in Time, thinks Congressional democrats are making a big political mistake by failing to control their insatiable appetite for American defeat.

When last seen before election day 2006, the Democratic Party seemed the very soul of moderation. And they stayed the course for the next two months…

But in the past few weeks, the Democrats have gone wild. The mushy domestic agenda is quickly disappearing beneath a tide of antiwar agitation in Congress. Joe Biden is leading the way, seeking to have as one of the first acts of the new Democratic Senate a nonbinding resolution condemning a troop increase in Iraq. Others want action, not just words. On the presidential side of the party, Hillary Clinton has gone at breakneck speed from being a mild critic of the war to calling for a legislated troop cap and threatening to cut off funds for the Iraqi army. Obama and John Edwards are cheerfully one-upping her by demanding a firm schedule for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. What happened?

In part, an accelerated presidential race, with its own dynamic. In part, the fact of congressional majority status, which has its own dynamic too. But in largest part, Bush. He crossed up the Democrats. They expected him to stay the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey course in Iraq. Or, they thought, he might accede to the Iraq Study Group, admit errors and lead us to gradual defeat. Neither would have required Democrats to do anything much except lament the lamentable situation into which Bush had got us. Instead, Bush replaced Rumsfeld, rejected the Iraq Study Group’s slow-motion-withdrawal option and chose to try a new strategy for victory, backed by a troop surge. The Democrats were genuinely shocked that Bush wouldn’t behave as if the war was lost.

What’s more, the Democratic presidential race was beginning, and the candidates were under pressure to do more than express generalized disapproval of Bush. And so for the past three weeks, Democrats have been outdoing one another in lambasting Bush and–as they see it–his war.

But in politics, as in life, exercises in competitive indignation can get out of hand. Biden got rolling his resolution disapproving of the surge–but without thinking through the counterattack that would be opened up. Now, as the troops begin to enter the theater, Republicans can ask whether the main effect of these merely symbolic resolutions isn’t to undermine the chances of Americans succeeding and to encourage our enemies. Similarly, the idea of a legislated cap on troop strength had seemed a good way to show real commitment to the antiwar cause. Yet actually explaining why 137,000 troops in Iraq was fine but increasing the number to 160,000 should be prohibited– when the new commander wanted those reinforcements and said they were necessary to give the new strategy a chance of success–that isn’t so easy.

The entire right-side of the Blogosphere is howling for the blood of Washington Post National and Homeland Security columnist William M. Arkin, who recently vented his irritation at soldiers serving in Iraq who have the temerity to criticize the people Arkin regards as the real heroes and defenders of American freedom: the anti-war opposition operating at home in the United States.

Some highlights from Arkin.

The Troops Also Need to Support the American People…

I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people…

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President’s handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order.

Sure it is the junior enlisted men who go to jail, but even at anti-war protests, the focus is firmly on the White House and the policy. We just don’t see very man “baby killer” epithets being thrown around these days, no one in uniform is being spit upon.

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

I can imagine some post-9/11 moment, when the American people say enough already with the wars against terrorism and those in the national security establishment feel these same frustrations. In my little parable, those in leadership positions shake their heads that the people don’t get it, that they don’t understand that the threat from terrorism, while difficult to defeat, demands commitment and sacrifice and is very real because it is so shadowy, that the very survival of the United States is at stake. Those Hoover’s and Nixon’s will use these kids in uniform as their soldiers. If I weren’t the United States, I’d say the story end with a military coup where those in the know, and those with fire in their bellies, save the nation from the people.

But it is the United States and instead this NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary – oops sorry, volunteer – force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The notion of dirty work is that, like laundry, it is something that has to be done but no one else wants to do it. But Iraq is not dirty work: it is not some necessary endeavor; the people just don’t believe that anymore.

I’ll accept that the soldiers, in order to soldier on, have to believe that they are manning the parapet, and that’s where their frustrations come in. I’ll accept as well that they are young and naïve and are frustrated with their own lack of progress and the never changing situation in Iraq. Cut off from society and constantly told that everyone supports them, no wonder the debate back home confuses them.

America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform. I don’t believe America needs a draft though I imagine we’d be having a different discussion if we had one.

Mr. Arkin, recognizably a radical leftist extremist, is mistaken in supposing that he and his fringe group, deviant, and perennially protesting ilk constitute the American people or have been authorized in any way shape or form to speak on their behalf.

Go walk into a public place frequented by normal American people, Mr. Arkin, like a bar, and repeat what you wrote for the Post, and you discover very quickly what the American people think of you and your kind. Be sure that your health and dental insurance are in order first would be my advice.

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Who is Arkin?

Hugh Hewitt explains:

Arkin is a veteran of four years in the Army (he served from 1974 to 1978) and many of his bylines from the past two decades described him as a “military intelligence analyst” during his service (his rank and units are not readily apparent). He received his BS from the University of Maryland.

His employment since leaving the service is easier to trace. Arkin cut his teeth with the lefty Institute for Policy Studies, and went from there to positions with Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Human Rights Watch. He has been a regular columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In recent years he has taken more mainstream work as a senior fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (he appears to do most of his writing not from the SAIS campus, but from his home in Vermont).

He is also the regular military affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

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Having become, not altogether surprisingly, after advising US troops serving overseas that they should be grateful that no one is spitting on them, the object of a good deal of criticism, Mr. Arkin today responds with self righteous indignation.

Well, one thing’s abundantly clear about who will actually defend our rights to say what we believe: It isn’t the hundreds who have written me saying they are soldiers or veterans or war supporters or real Americans — who also advise me to move to another country, to get f@##d, or to die a painful, violent death.

Move to another country, get f@##d, and so on, Mr. Arkin.

Ben Stein had a moment of satori during the State of Union speech.

So there I was, lying in my bed in Malibu with my dogs, watching Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech. I thought it was darned good. Realistic, gracious, modest, sensible. I happen to think we should get out of Iraq yesterday, but I thought Mr Bush put forward his case well. And Congress responded graciously and generously on both sides of the aisle.

Then, whaam, as soon as the speech was over, ABC was bashing him, telling us how pathetic he was, how irrelevant he was, how weak he was, how unrealistic he was.

Right after that, Jim Webb gave a very short speech biting Bush’s head off — but not making any concrete proposals about anything. No network person mentioned how simple minded and unrealistic he was.

Then, tonight, the next night, I walked into the kitchen where my wife had left the radio going with NPR to amuse the cats. NPR was having a call-in show talking about the State of the Union. The first speaker I heard was a country music legend, Merle Haggard, who said he had never seen things so bad in this country. Then a legion of anonymous callers chimed in with similar thoughts.

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn’t done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is (and I mean ENDLESSLY) and how he’s just a vestigial organ on the body politic right now.

The media is doing what it can to basically oust Mr. Bush while still leaving him alive and well in the White House. It’s a sort of neutron bomb of media that seeks to kill him while leaving the White House standing (for their favorite unknown, Barack Obama, to occupy).

Collected by Austin Bay.

Examples:

Air jockey: Fighter pilot or a fixed-wing pilot. On rare occasions, might refer to a helicopter pilot.

Ali Baba: Slang for enemy forces. Originated in the Persian Gulf War.

Battle rattle: Slang for combat gear. “Full battle rattle” means wearing and carrying everything (helmet, body armor, weapons).

Beltway clerk: A derisive term for a Washington political operative or civilian politician.

Bilat: A bilateral conference between coalition military units and local people. (“We’re going on a bilat to discuss the security situation with Haji.”)

Blackwater: Specifically, a private security firm operating in Iraq. Used as slang, can mean any private security firm. “Gone to Blackwater” indicates that a soldier quit the armed services and went to work for a private security firm.

Blue canoe: Slang for a portable toilet.

Read the whole thing.