Dowbrigade

"Why
can’t they just photograph conservatives straight?!" blasted this
week’s TIME magazine covergirl Ann Coulter.

The bestselling author and controversialist slammed magazine editors for fronting
a photo of her, she claims, which is so distorted "my own mother would not
even recognize me!"

The photographer, Platon, appears to have used a wide "Fisheye" lense
for the cover snap, stretching Coulter’s legs and feet — while shrinking the
rest of her body.

article from Drudge

Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to
determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on
fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured
on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

The patient died after the surgery but that was due to heart failure and not
the fire, said Dr. Robert Caplan, medical quality director of Virginia Mason.

The two-year-old incident became publicly known after an anonymous letter
sent to the media mentioned it as a sign of unsafe health care at the
hospital, and said the patient burned to deat

article from Yahoo

Who
makes these names up? We are convinced there is a windowless office somewhere,
in Heaven or Hell if not on this Earth, where
a squad of poor bastards is charged with making up all the names we read
in the newspaper or hear on television.  Mostly, the names are pretty
good, and we hardly notice their subtle subconscious messages or artificiality,
but sometimes, we know not why, the made-up names in the news stand out
starkly either for their theatrical appropriateness or for plain bad
taste. Perhaps every once in a while the good shit makes it into the
windowless room.

For example, who keeps coming up with names like Joey Buttafuco and
Condoleeza Rice. These are obviously fake names. Another example is the
ridiculous insistence that the titular head of the World
Bank
be
a member
of the rapaciousWolf
Pack – James Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz being
the latest examples. Isn’t that kind of rubbing our faces in it?

Other cases abound, like Haitian Prime
Minister Gerard
Latortue. Or, whoever got the idea of naming the capital of the
free Republic of Albania
Tirana? Then there are the sorry surnames
of the Russian doubles team of the Elenas: Dementieva and Bovina,
or the equally unfortunately named Russian skater Irina
Slutskaya.

But the naming nerds outdid themselves when they assembled the current
College of Cardinals to "elect"
the next Pope.  Do they
expect us to believe that the two top candidates are really named Ratzinger
and Lustiger?
Pynchon couldn’t have come up with more sinister names in his prime! Maybe our
friend Harold the Chips Tycoon is right, and the Pope is indeed the Anti-Christ.

Papal article from the Boston Globe

As mentioned a couple of days ago, this is tres cool. Also cool is that
strategic area of Washington D.C. and most military facilities are rendered
unviewable by this very smart and powerful service. Yesterday, for example,
Norma Yvonne and the Dowbrigade came upon the beginning of a walking
trail/bike path in nearby Belmont, Mass.  Using the
Google service we were able to follow it to its end, over 20 km and three towns away,
and plan out our route for a first person exploration later this week.
Also, for spies and crooks, a great way to case the joint or get the
lay of the land before starting an operation…

Google’s satellite mapping service