One regular readers is reporting that NYM is loading slowly for him on certain browser. “it seemingly NEVER loads on Safari, and takes forever on Chrome, but it’s speedy with Firefox.”

Is anybody else experiencing this problem?

Hussar, enormous Taigan puppy, just about in my lap.

Dogs!

We have two: Uhlan, a 9-year-old Tazy (a breed of sighthound from Kazakhstan) and Hussar, a one-year-old Taigan (a breed of sighthound from Kyrgysztan, a member of the first litter born in North America). (I have friends who are into weird dogs.)

The tazy is significantly smaller, but smarter and a lot more feral. Uhlan has all the unspoiled-by-civilization-and-domestication wildness and complete lack of subordination that crazy sighthound fanatics particularly prize.

The taigan is huge, black, and goofy. He is a lummox with no sense whatsover of how much space he takes up and no regard for human property. He is fanatically playful, in the manner of a puppy, and he loves to fetch and retrieve dog toys.

The tazy is like the Dragon Smaug in The Hobbit. He considers all dog toys his and will collect them and then sit gloating over the pile of them.

Smaug’s greed recently reached a new peak. When he hears the impact of a toy I’ve thrown for the puppy, Smaug will deliberately come downstairs, confiscate the toy, and remove it to his hoard upstairs.

Last night, Karen and I were watching a movie, and the puppy wanted to play, so he brought over the flat, entirely disemboweled rag that was once some kind of stuffed animal. Karen and I were distracted by the movie, so Uhlan’s sudden arrival was overlooked. A violent dog tussle and spinning canine tornado erupted in front of us, which quickly took hold of the power cord of my brand-new $1500 laptop PC, yanking it right off the table and hurling it to the floor.

The new Lenovo survived, but the male end of the power cord was twisted and bent. Last night, I thought it still made an electrical connection, but I was wrong. That cord is as dead as Fogarty’s goat.

I ordered a replacement last night. $47.00 and change, discounted from Amazon. It’s due to arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m back on my older, slower machine.

If anybody is planning any medical experiments, I know where he can get a couple of dogs.

It is also monsooning here and satellite Internet is out a great deal. Blogging will be light.

The fake “Second Shooter” story fooled Lucianne briefly, and therefore me.

“CNN-International” is clearly not really CNN at all, just another fake news site.

Fact checked here.

Why they bother is a mystery to me.

Ads in twenty cities are offering $2500 a month on top of $50 an hour to protest Trump’s inauguration. The advertiser calls itself “Demand Protest.” Federalist Papers.

Who do you suppose is supplying all the money? Soros?

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Matt MacLean forwards this strange Tucker Carlson interview story:

Here’s how Tucker Carlson began the interview:

“This is a sham, your company isn’t real, your website is fake, the claims you have made are lies, this is a hoax. Let me start at the beginning, however, with your name, Dom Tullipso, which is not your real name. It’s a fake name, we ran you through law enforcement-level background checks and that name does not exist. So let’s start out with the truth. Tell me what your real name is.”

Okay, let’s back up a second.

Carlson invited the man identifying himself as Dom Tullipso on his show to talk about this new group that’s popped up called Demand Protest. It says on the site, “When your strategy demands paid protest, we organize and bring it to life.”

A few sites picked up on supposed ads this group was passing around reading “Get paid fighting against Trump!” However, it seems pretty clear this is a hoax.

The back-and-forth between Carlson and “Tullipso” was kind of amazing, and this was the moment when Carlson realized he was witnessing performance art before his very eyes:

“We are greatly, greatly supportive of national treasures such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Peyton Manning, and we really support their efforts to really get the truth out there, and in the case of the current client we have right now, uh, that client is, um, very interested in releasing the Roswell papers.”

Oh, and in case you’re wondering if the reference to Peyton Manning instead of Chelsea was a slip-up, he did it again a bit later, after he actually said, “We shifted from being against Trump to Trump about 30 minutes ago.”

But towards the end of the interview, even Carlson’s guest couldn’t help but admit his surprise that he was invited on TV in the first place. After, of course, he said this:

“We are now supporting Trump in the hope that the Roswell documents from 1947 are finally released and put back into the hands of Fisher Stevens.”

The above linked an earlier story from this from The Verge which contends that the story is a hoax:

According to publicly available who.is information, although demandprotest.com attracted virtually no attention until last week, the domain name was registered last month. Despite having no discernible presence until after the election, the website claims to include an endorsement from an “unnamed” 2016 presidential campaign chair, who allegedly called the group’s work “astonishing.” The page also lists a “copyright” of 2015 to 2017 for Demand Protest, LLC., and claims to have been extraordinarily busy in that time, racking up 48 “campaigns” with 1,817 paid “operatives.” Phone contact information leads to a dead-end voicemail box, and the group did not respond to an email.

The story gained traction yesterday, and was picked up by conspiracy website Infowars — where, even then, it was met with some skepticism. (“It’s unclear if the DemandProtest.com website is actually legitimate,” the site’s story says.) Still, other conservative-leaning websites with reputations for inaccuracy have joined in. “BREAKING: Far Left Group Is Paying Activists a Monthly Salary to Stop TRUMP,” the Gateway Pundit blog blared.

Deeply weird. It is still entirely unclear what “Dom Tullipso” and “Demand ProtesT” are all about, but it seems clear that they are not a subsidiary of MoveOn.org.

Never Yet Melted’s logo comes from a 19th century Life of Frontiersman & Indian Fighter Lewis Wetzel, depicting Wetzel shooting one of three Indians attempting to kill him. Wetzel was able to reload on the run and killed all three of his pursuers. The image was chosen as a rustic American homage to the images of irrationality and barbarism defeated by civilized Western intelligence originally displayed on the Parthenon in Athens and on the Great Altar of Zeus and Athena in Pergamon.

Never Yet Melted has been around a while now, but remains (the complimentary term is) a boutique blog, inevitably limited in readership due to the idiosyncratic opinions, eccentricities, and often esoteric interests of its solitary editor and proprietor.

Surprisingly, today NYM has been named (for the first time ever) to one of those lists of THE FIFTY TOP BLOGS RIGHT NOW by The Daley Gator.

We’re in some good company on his list, though he has obviously overlooked a number of far more prominent and important conservative blogs than this one.

There is a small category of movies which fail to make much of a mark during their theatrical release; but which, when they make it onto television, and are available to be watched repeatedly, begin to commend themselves to audiences in a different and special way and which then proceed to metamorphize into beloved classics.

Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) is that kind of film. Nobody thought much of it at all until television networks adopted it as particularly Christmas-themed, and began making a big deal of broadcasting it around the holiday. Before long, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” turned into a regular seasonal American ritual.

“The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) was a failure in its theatrical release that did not even recapture its production costs, but Ted Turner (then owning Castle Rock, the film’s production company) later essentially sold the movie to himself (as the TNT network) and began broadcasting it in 1997 over and over again. The film slowly and gradually grew in audience acceptance as a sort of 20th century Les Miserables, and now routinely tops the IMBD list of most-beloved films of all time.

Shawshank Redemption phenomenon

“The Big Lebowski” (1998) followed the same pattern, of confusing and boring viewers in the theater, but coming into its own with the aid of repetitive viewings on television.

The Big Lebowski phenomenon

NBC:

Exciting news for Big Lebowski fans around the world as a sequel to the cult classic has just been announced.

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, directors of the first Lebowski movie, confirmed with NBC News they will both be returning to direct the sequel.

“We’re thrilled to be coming back to film a second part to this classic movie,” Ethan Coen said. “For years we’ve been staying away from doing this project but when we received this new script and the cast fell into place, it was a no-brainer. We just had to do it.”

Gage Luce, who helped write the new script, spoke with CNN to shed light on the plot behind the highly anticipated sequel.

“Now 18 years later, Maude Lewbowski (played by Julianne Moore) informs The Dude (Jeff Bridges) that they conceived a son together and that he has been kidnapped. The Dude teams up with his estranged brother, played by actor Bill Murray, and fellow bowling partner Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) to track down the child’s whereabouts. Just like the first movie, there’s guaranteed to be plenty of beers, bowling, and laughs.” …

Accompanying the trio on their journey to find the missing teen is Jesus Quintana, played by John Turturro, who stole the show in the original movie. …

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RETRACTION 10/24:

Bummer! The story is not true. It turns out that it was originated by the spoof news site National Report which has a very annoying habit of purveying completely plausible sounding, but entirely false, news stories. National Report often fools people, and this time a number of sources believed the story and picked it up, including me.

Snopes

Thanks to Liberty News for bringing this mistake to my attention in the comments.

The migration has taken place. But some technical issues (principally with image files) are still causing problems.

Be back later.

115 English colonists established a new colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina on July 22, 1587. The first English child born in North America, Virginia Dare, was born on August 18th. Her grandfather, the colony’s governor, John White, left for England, later that year in search of aid and reinforcements for the new colony.

The arrival of the Spanish Armada and the consequent war with Spain delayed assistance and White’s return. He finally arrived back at Roanoke on August 18, 1590, his grand daughter’s third birthday. White found the colony deserted and the homes and fortifications dismantled. The only clue to the fate of the English colonists was the word “Croatoan” found carved in a tree.

World News Daily reports that recent archaeological investigations appear to have solved the mystery of what happened to the Lost Colony.

Archaeologists excavating an early 17th century Native American village near the Enoree River in Laurens County, North Carolina, have discovered seven contemporary Christian sepultures holding the skeletons of six males and one female of European origins. The bones have been proven through comparative DNA testing, to have belonged to members of the lost colony of Roanoke, established in 1585 on Roanoke Island, which disappeared mysteriously. …

The female skeleton has been identified thanks to DNA testing, as Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. The DNA of the skeleton which was found in October, was compared to that of modern day descendants of Governor John White, her grandfather. The test confirmed that the bones were indeed with more than 99.8% certainty, those of Ms. Dare. Four of the others corpses have also been identified through the same process by the scientists, including that of the girl’s father Ananias Dare, a tiler and bricklayer from London. The other identified skeletons are those of Arnold Archard and his son Thomas, as well as the young John Sampson. …

It is still unclear if the colonists were taken as prisoners or if they sought shelter with the Eno people, but Professor Monroe and his team believe that the colonists were most likely sold into slavery at some point in time and held captive by differing bands of the Eno tribe, who were known slave traders. They survived with the natives for many years, as Virginia Dare who was born in August 1587, was estimated to have been around twenty years old at the time of her death.

This astounding discovery seems to confirm the 17 th Century writings of William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony. He wrote in his The historie of travaile into Virginia Britannia in 1612, that four English men, two boys and one girl had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoc, under the protection of a chief called Eyanoco. This mysterious settlement had however evaded discovery until now, as its location was not clearly mentioned by the author and no other mention of it or its chief have ever been recorded.

Strachey had reported that the captives were forced to beat copper for the natives. He explains that they had escaped an attack that had allegedly killed most of the other colonists. They would have fled up the Chaonoke river (the present-day Chowan River in Bertie County, North Carolina) only to be captured by Eno warriors.

Read the whole thing.

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CORRECTION AND RETRACTION, later on 12/29:

This is only the second time in many years I fell for a fake story. (The first time was when I first came across Duffleblog and failed to recognize that the story was appearing on a satire site.

This Roanoke story looked good and had a very plausible ring to it. There was no obvious giveaway.

But, one commenter, Gray, called the story out, and he is perfectly correct. There is no Professor William J. Monroe at Johns Hopkins or anywhere else. This story is otherwise completely unreported. There is no Laurens County in North Carolina. And “World News Daily” is just a totally irresponsible Israeli tabloid that evidently thinks making up stories like this is fun.

Apologies to Free Republic and American Digest. I’m off to eat a large plate of crow.

Via du vide.

Long exposure photo of a lightning bolt hitting a tree. Photo by Darren Pearson.

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A commenter linked Hoaxes.org, which explains:

[I]t is a long exposure shot, but not of lightning. It’s a photo created by “light painter” Darren Pearson (aka Darius Twin). Wikipedia defines light painting as “a photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera.”

Pearson light painted the blue flames at the base of the tree. He then cut-and-pasted the lightning bolt itself into the photo from a NOAA image of a lightning strike (below).

Pearson posted the image on his Facebook page on Oct. 17, 2013, with the caption “The old Benjamin Franklin trick wink”

So in its original context this was clearly presented as an art photo.

This unusual outage resulted from a disagreement between my personal version of WordPress and my web hosting server’s most recent security updates, intended to defeat the Heartbleed bug.