Category: Internet

Guardian Unlimited Sport | Olympics | Clean sweep: the wacky world of curling

? Although the stones do curl, the term “curling” is derived from the old verb curr (grumble) because of the noise the stones make on the ice.

? The Canadian film Men With Brooms, about a local curling team, is due to be released in Canada next month. Starring Naked Gun actor Leslie Nielsen as a small-town team skip, it has been described as “Rocky on ice”.

? A curling rink in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was used as a temporary morgue for bodies recovered from the Titanic disaster.

from the Olympics may be an idea whose time has come. While most of the Olympic whining attention has focussed on Russia’s threatened hissy-fit, Korean criminal acts have gone largely unnoticed. This is all I could find on them (AP)
Continue reading “Banning South Korea”

— VodkaPundit – Chill Before Serving

UPDATE: Putting politics in its proper place. Post victory, pre-medal ceremony interview with Sarah:
Interviewer: “Who was that on the cell phone?”
Sarah: “Someone just handed it to me, I think it was a Congressman or something.”

Make that a double.

is linked by this nice little summary on techno-blog Saltire Blogging by Steve MacLaughlin:

The best curling stones are all mined from the same location: the Ailsa Craig. The Ailsa Craig is a towering island of granite rising 1100 feet from the surface of the Firth of Clyde off Scotland’s west coast. The Ailsa Craig is sometimes known as Paddy’s Milestone as it sits between Scotland and Ireland.

Take a walk on the wild side and check out technoblogs.

The Nando Times: Pentagon says new office won’t deliberately spread lies

WASHINGTON (February 20, 2002 3:55 p.m. EST) – Pentagon officials on Wednesday denied planning to use a new Office of Strategic Influence to plant erroneous information in the news media to promote U.S. war goals.

“The Pentagon does not issue disinformation to the foreign press or any press,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

Too bad – I was looking forward to some standard-issue, government-produced fiction; the civilian stuff’s getting too predictable. But it probably would have read like government cheese tastes.

— Americans win last four games to reach semis

OGDEN, Utah — The American women’s curling team clinched an Olympics semifinals spot with an 11-2 victory over Norway on Monday.
Continue reading “Curling babes in final four”

David Boaz on Scotland & Afghanistan compares the two backward, mountainous, religion-obsessed countries, highlighting the contributions of Scots to the development of modernity:

The Scots pioneered the social sciences: the scientific study of history and human nature. By the late 18th century, the most important books in Europe were Scottish books, beginning with Francis Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy and Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man and going on to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, and more.

And not just books: the inventor James Watt, the architect Robert Adam, the road builder John MacAdam, the bridge builder Thomas Telford, and later Scots such as Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie demonstrated the practical side of Scottish philosophy.

Boaz suggests Afghanistan can take the Scottish road.

David Horowitz takes down the David Talbot column I posted recently here: Axis of snobbery

It’s time for the intellectual class to begin reassessing its self-exposing snobbery toward George W. Bush. This reappraisal has already begun to take place. A February Tarrance Group poll reveals that 65 percent of American college students are now “glad that George Bush is president.” Only 18 percent wish it was Al Gore.

It’s well worth a read, since he amplifies and supports my main points.

My speculation that hawala is small potatoes is contradicted by this WaPo story Al Qaeda’s Road Paved With Gold :

In small shops and businesses along the border, the money and gold, taken from Afghanistan’s banks and national coffers, were collected and moved by trusted Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, according to sources familiar with the events.

Then, using couriers and the virtually untraceable hawala money transfer system, they transferred millions of dollars to this desert sheikdom, where the assets were converted to gold bullion.

And so much for the theory that they hate us because they’re poor.

is the subject of an excellent collection of historical insights at the Kolkata Libertarian, complete with charts and maps. It begins with:

An unhurried tectonic shift is in progress in South Asian politics, driven into the limelight by the events of 9/11 in the US and 12/13 in India. By many in the Palestinian and Arab media, as well as in the West, it is viewed with deep suspicion, some anger and sadness.

Bottom line is that historical ties between India and the Israeli people run deep.

BTW, Cochin’s Jew Town is empty now, as all the old-timers have moved to Israel. There are probably more Jews in Kerala ashrams now than there are in Cochin, for what it’s worth.