This being a short week, I will postpone the usual Friday Game until next Friday. Also, there will be no posts until 1/3/2007. Oh, and if you haven’t checked it out, The Fat Robot Radio Episode 20 spectacular is up at Fat Robot Radio. It is a big, big show, and we are pretty excited about it.

Have a great New Year Everybody, and remember, be careful, New Year’s Eve is amateur night, and there will be a lot of lightweight under-performers out there trying to drink like they did back in college. They are dangerous, dangerous people, and are not to be trusted. Stupid people don’t get any smarter when they’re drunk, so, you know, watch your ass.

Gerald Ford, who died Tuesday, BLASTED President Bush yesterday:

“I don’t think I would have gone to war. Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”

Damn. Even dead people think Iraq is an ill-conceived disaster.

Ford’s comments were culled from a four hour-long interview conducted as book research, and were to be released only after Ford’s death. Sort of a little, now I’m dead so here’s the REAL truth, sort of deal. If you are interested in this kind of thing AT ALL, then you should read this article. It made President Ford more interesting to me than he has ever been. Fascinating and candid insight on people like Cheney, who worked under him. I also really liked the depiction of Henry Kissinger as a thin-skinned little crybaby. Nice.

Gerald Ford has died, and I am forced to wonder if he’ll receive one of those full on Reagan Style super funerals where giant lines of weeping mourners pass quickly by his casket for an opportunity to salute the fallen leader one last time. Probably not.

Gerald Ford was an important historical figure and I think it’s necessary that we acknowledge his contribution to American History, which was primarily his being the only non-corrupt member of the Nixon administration, and therefore the only man left standing to fill the big chair when the whole Watergate thing imploded. He was also the longest lived president, and apparently liked to golf.

If you would like to read an article about Gerald Ford that contains actual facts and provides the sort of respectful remembrance called for on this sort of occasion, click here.

As families all across the world prepare to celebrate Christmas, I thought it might be nice to conduct a little holiday poll:

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY! SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!

If the screeching ass wipes of the Christian right are to be believed, all our nations problems can be solved by not having sex. In their estimation no sex leads to no aids, no unwanted pregnancy, no abortion, and no social problems of any kind. Abstinence only education has been national policy since Bush took office, and has been encouraged for people well into their twenties. IT’S SO SIMPLE! All you have to do is repress all your natural urges! Sex is bad, unless it is joylessly performed by two heterosexual married people only for the purposes of reproduction. DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE FUN?

This must mean that the gigantic section of the population that is Christian waits until marriage to have sex. AT LEAST the members of the Christian right must. Is this realistic? Do people really wait until they are married to have sex? Observe:

Study: 95 percent in U.S. had premarital sex

Oh, so, everybody just has sex anyway? Huh. People, strangely enough, like to screw. I guess it’s time to go back to talking about condoms. Go figure.

Oh, and, while we’re on the subject, look at what I found in a Washington Post article:

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman’s investigators:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.”

• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called “Me, My World, My Future,” teaches that women who have an abortion “are more prone to suicide” and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

From these two articles I can draw only one conclusion: Abstinence Only Policy is so misguided that the religious right must fabricate evidence for propaganda that doesn’t even work. NICE JOB GUYS!

If this is the best that the Vast Conservative Conspiracy can do, then I’m really not all that worried about them.

Joseph Barbera has died at the age of 95. Barbera, along with William Hanna, created such animation classics as “Tom & Jerry,” “Yogi Bear,” “Scooby-Doo,” “The Jetsons,” “The Flintstones,” and a about eight hundred million other staples of Non-Warner Brothers American animation history. Hanna died in 2001.

Here is an excellent article about Hanna Barbera.

Check out this game here:

MAP CHALLENGE

In this geography game you are given random US states to place on a blank map of the USA. Try it. I got an 84% the first time I played, and came to a painful realization that there are far to many square states, and that I don’t know where any of them are. Who knew Colorado wasn’t on the Canadian border?

This game is the hardest thing on the internet. The non-porn internet that is.

This is a straight up target shooting game. What I like about it is that your score improves with accuracy. Like Duck Hunt, in that you are shooting moving targets, but better, in that it doesn’t piss me off so much.

This game makes all this noise and is distracting, so CLICK HERE to play it.

Looks like Bush’s angry God has done a little Democratic smiting, putting control of the Senate in jeopardy. Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota suffered a brain hemorrhage yesterday, which is sad, very, very sad, and is a great tragedy for his family, but that, lets be honest, is extremely bad news for the Democratic party. If he is out, if he has some long ordeal of a rehabilitation or is mentally disabled in some way, and has to resign, then the Democrats will lose their Senate Majority. South Dakota has a Republican Governor, and he will probably appoint a Republican nominee. It sucks, it is completely unfair, but is unfortunately the reality of the situation. We’ll just have to see what happens. I hope Senator Johnson recovers, not only because of its significance to the future of the country, but because he is a human being going through an extremely trying time.

If you are at all a fan of the Back To The Future movies, check out this entry on Wikipedia:

Back to the Future timeline

It is a super detailed timeline of the movie’s events. It is beyond interesting, though that might be due to the fact that I am such a big fan of the movies. I sort of put this up here because whoever did this worked so hard on it, that it deserves some recognition. Well done. Obsessive people used to be outcasts, but they banded together and invented the internet. Nice. People like this guy are who keep the internet from becoming one giant shopping mall.