Hot Semifinal Action!

You write about politics AS IF it is Sport. I see what you did there.

Mikey Steele. The Pitts of the GOP.

Boehner v Bachmann? Not enough makeup in D.C. to cover that mess. Not that the two of them haven’t tried, though.

(P.S.: Haven’t heard a damn thing from the GOP in re Detroit in the day since we all heard that Wa-goner was being shown the door. Fight by not fighting. Clever move.)

@chicago bureau: When you mention Boehner v. Bachmann, I get really, really bad mental images caught in my head.

@rptrcub:
Agreed.

If I had to throw money down, well, I’d bet on Bachmann. You NEVER bet against crazy.

@Benedick: You mean it isn’t sport? I thought they were the same thing. Totemic tribalism, like on the walls of the cave at Lascaux.

@chicago bureau: Sure, they can blame the Obama depression on his mismanagement of the economy and the closure of automotive companies on Obama’s islamomarxist hatred of capitalism.

@FlyingChainSaw: Ya think Chrysler sales will go to zero today? Or what? What good is a gov’t guarantee of a warranty if no one is making the goddam parts any more?

@Dodgerblue: In other news, my father, who works at an auto parts plant in Columbia SC (where the unemployment rate is 14%) is also taking up welding at a tech school. They decided not to shut the plant but in the event they do, it’s an excuse to come back home to Atlanta (which I really wish they’re able to do).

@ManchuCandidate: The snake eyes have it.

If Hopey’s economic team were all from GM, instead of Goldman Sachs, I wonder if the pattern would be different?

@Prommie:
Personally, I think this is what Hopey should have done to Wall St.

What I don’t get is the whole martyr act that is going on about Waggoner. Waggoner was incompetent tool from what I’ve read about him and had many critics. Seems strange that folks would defend a guy who lost some 82 BIL over 4 years (and 2 1/2 of those years were in “good” economical years.)

@Dodgerblue: Unless, they just fire sale everything and start selling them off for $500 a pop.

@Prommie: No shit, it’s beyond obvious and the crisis at hand had little to do with the auto manufacturers per se but Ford had a really fucking nasty mortgage outfit for a while that caught the attention of regulators. As I remember, they had to chance the name.

DEVELOPING HARD: Ann Althouse is marrying one of her commenters.

Wow.

@chicago bureau: What could possibly go wrong?

@chicago bureau: Best of all, she’s now all pissy at Sullivan for linking to a response of OMFG.

@SanFranLefty: All I ever knew about Ack!house was courtesy of Chicago Bureau. Now I need brain bleach, since I’ve read her own comment about wanting to “quaff some mead”…

Nabisco: “quaff some mead”

I think we may have a non-Stinque Comment of the Day.

@Nabisco: That’s better than boffing some mead.

Sorry. I have a cold and I’m not hitting on all cylinders.

Oh, and then there’s this, in re Sully v. Althouse (Round… well… I’ve lost count on how many times they’ve gotten into a pissing match):

This isn’t about legal rights. This is about how individuals treat each other, and I want to know why you disrespected me. Explain why you linked to Pandagon’s scurrilous OMFG, which, as you know, means ‘Oh, my fucking God.’ Is that the way you mean to speak to me? Is that the way you talk about God?

Ah! Hyperventilating over acronyms — positive proof that this is a love that knows no bounds. Mazel tov!

@chicago bureau:
Umkay?

Oh boy, that’s going to one happy wonderful long lasting full-O-Krazee-“No MORE WIRE HANGERS” kind of marriage.

@chicago bureau: Is that the way you talk about God?

I know who’s going on our Zombie announcement list…

@Nabisco: I think she MEANT to say “quaff some merde,” but the spellchecker changed it.

@WaltTrombone: Tish! You cursed French!

Who is this althouse? Is she a 19 year old lit major? “Quaff some Meade?” Is she going to repair posthaste to an Inne, perhaps, there to do her meade-quaffing? Or will she betaketh herself thither? For fucks sake. Renaissance Fair-tarde much?

The scary thing is: if things really do to shit over the next three years, we could be looking at a President Palin and Vice President Wurzlebacher (or whatever the fuck his name is).

@Benedick: Honestly, it’s the only way I can make sense of all the players right now — they seem to be competing with each other for who can come up with the most idiotic soundbite on a given day.

Per Tool, I really wouldn’t mind a considered debate over the pressing issues of the day. But all the GOP is doing is stepping up its hyperbolic paranoid demonizing. Thus, Sport.

Prommie: Is she a 19 year old lit major?

Law prof with a BFA, but close. (Law blogger who totally hearts the War on Terrah and hates the living crap out of Bill Clinton, but is otherwise — supposedly — liberal. Ish.)

Mead is actually mispelled — “Meade” is the commenter to whom Althouse is to be hitched. Hence, “quaff some meade” has some fairly obvious connotations which tend to sicken one who reads it.

@chicago bureau: So I was right about boffing Meade!!

Hey SFL, I hear you guys had a 4.1 or so shaker up by Morgan Hill. Everybody OK?

@Dodgerblue: It was a 4.3. I was on the phone with someone in Oakland at the time, and she felt it a second before it rolled over to SF. Some of the stuff on my shelves got knocked over and the office building creaked. More like a twitchy earthquake than a rolly earthquake. Haven’t gone home yet to see if the wine glasses fell out of the dish rack.

There has been a swarm of quakes over by the Salton Sea, hopefully it’s dissipating the pressure down in SoCal rather than warning of the overdue big one in San Bedoo/Riverside on the southern edge of the San Andreas Fault.

@SanFranLefty: I’m hoping for something in the high 4s or low 5s when RML is here on Wednesday, maybe a strong jolt followed by some rolling. Give him a feel for the place.

@chicago bureau:

Gah, have you any idea what mead is made from? It is fermented honey in water. It has alcohol in it, but I don’t think any of us could drink it due to the cloying, obnoxious taste, and that, my friends, is saying something.

@Tommmcatt the Wet Sprocket: I picked the wrong week to stop drinking mead.

@nojo:

I had it at a Shakespeare Festival I was working at once. Believe me, there is no wrong time to stop drinking mead. The wrong comes in starting it.

@Tommmcatt the Wet Sprocket: I had a Greek Muscat like that once. Tasted like slightly fermented syrup. Yuck.

@mellbell:

Isn’t the difference between good dessert wine and just-ok or terrible dessert wine HUGE? I had a lovely dessert chardonnay the other day, I can’t recommend it enough..I will get the name for you guys tonight.

Most dessert wine is like syrup tho.

@Dodgerblue: Thank FSM, none of the bar glassware in the SFL home broke in today’s tremor. Glassware normally breaks in our household due to my general spazziness.

@SanFranLefty:

More to the point, thank the Lord that you are safe and okay, my dulcet darling….

@SanFranLefty: So many portents, so many auguries, SFL has had an earthquake, Northern NJ has had a few this winter, last night a big fireball meteor was seen from Virginia to Delaware, accompanied by a huge “boom” that had people by the hundreds calling cops everywhere. I am sure a two-headed calf has been born somewhere. Is this the closing of the age, did we get the starting point of the millenia (all of them) wrong by 9 years?

I have had a premonition, Jesus is coming, this Sunday, Easter. We have to get Baked down at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher Sunday morning to watch and give warning.

Mead sucks, at least that which is made by my fishing buddy’s teen age son. The kid has a snake, a hot gf and an AK-47. I have dibs on the rifle if he ever has to hock it.

So . . . anyway, I guess I need to stock up on some beenie weenie and some bottled water for the Big One. I already got other basic survival stuff out in the rig, even the Grundig windup shortwave/AM/FM radio with the built in flashlight. Left the heat at home ‘cos of CA’s onerous handgun laws that are designed to keep people from getting kilt, like them three folks in Compton last night. Guess *someone’s* getting a citation for that.

C’est chic, so chic – Stinqueout! Wednesday April 1, 7 pm meetup at the lobby of The Ambrose hotel in Santa Monica CA.

TJ for gearheads, man builds perfect scale model of a chevy V-8, a little bigger than his fist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg0k7zDsB8w

Thats just NEAT! I think its another sign.

@Promnight: Thanks for that … as the resident gearhead, I really appreciate it.

@Promnight: Easter is a week from Sunday, you lapsed Papist you.

@redmanlaw: I know we have the Stinquers and Spouses (and Son) at the meet-up, but are TommCatt and Dodger bringing their dogs to the Stinque-Up? Because apparently I’ll never see a picture of TommCatt’s new puppeh if you or Dodger don’t take care of it for him….

@SanFranLefty: I exist in the moment, a week, two, a year? Its all a formless void to me, the future.

@blogenfreude: Did you see what the Germans can do? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mutb7KgA9NM&NR=1

This is a whole world I never knew existed. Craftsmen, artists, who can machine a working V-8 engine 10 inches long from billets of steel, and make it run. These people are Gods. And they do this miraculous thing, this unappreciated, ignored, yet absolutely spectacular thing, they produce this art, that says as much to me about the human drive for some transcendant perfection, in no matter what odd way it comes out, as a masterpiece painting.

I raise my glass to them, and thier strange little universe that apparently flourishes almost unknown in this world.

As a sometime WWII aviation buff, I had been daydreaming just a day or so
ago about the feasibility of a scaled-down, nine-cylinder radial internal
combustion engine. How does one solve the problem of insufficient power
to outrun, outdive, outclimb the Axis ‘ best? Simple, really. How about adding nine more cylinders, forming the legendary double-bank
engine producing 2000 horsepower or more. A miniature version of this
Pratt and Whitney Wasp could lead to a life-changing decision…
something along the lines of building a quarter-scale Chance-Vought F4U Corsair. Or, perhaps a Grumman F6F Hellcat or a Republic P47 Thunderbolt would be more appealing to some.
In any case, though I’ll never embark upon the aforementioned project,
I can rest in the knowledge that smaller problems are being solved. With
the advent of more efficient electrical propulsion systems, people have
successfully developed miniature airborne sound systems which simulate
the sounds of the piston or turbojet engines of their full-sized prototypes! Think I’m kidding? Don’t bet on it.

@EffeteHipster:

http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/park.htm

That’s dedication (and insanity and a tolerant wife.)

I personally prefer the sleeker lines of the P-51 Mustang.

@ManchuCandidate: Me too. Every now and then, there’s a fly-in display of WWII aircraft at Santa Monica Airport, about a mile from my house. I love the sound of those big piston engines at low altitude.

@Promnight: If we’re going to escape the zombies, it will be on the back of miniature V8s or on the wings of scale-model P-51s.

@EffeteHipster: Well, here is a 14 cylinder, twin-bank rotary engine, more from the germans, the bastards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtBmoUmiHTw&feature=channel

@Promnight: @ManchuCandidate: Everyone prefers the P51 for aesthetic appeal, myself included. But, if you were racing a falling anvil, the P47 plug-ugly ‘Jug’ would beat it to the spot and pull out
safely. @Dodgerblue: Yeah, that’s the whole idea. And there’s nothing like the thunder of radial engines. By contrast, the V12 inline of the “Mustang” or “Spit” was loud, but refined.
It’s a good thing the “Hellcat” was a Navy aircraft carrier denizen. Even this brutish, hulk-like fighter couldn’t look too bad in the flat lightblue of its top deck feathered into a cloudy gray along its nether surfaces. Incidentally, gents, your links were extremely worthwhile to follow up. Thanks ever so.

@EffeteHipster: Should I go for a ride in this? Its got the Pratt and Whitney Wasp radial, and it lives near me in the summer, I have seen it doing loops over the ocean.

http://www.warbirdtours.com/about_plane.asp

@Prommie: The aircraft has only three thousand miles on it, and it’s flown by the guy who discovered and restored it and undoubtedly keeps a close eye on its maintenance. As a former airline employee myself (American Airlines, 1965-74) and a crew scheduler for five years, I have great respect for Russo’s experience and qualifications.

Have you ever been through aerobatics yourself before? If not, you’d be
amazed at the discomfort involved. I’m sure Capt. Russo has experience interviewing passengers before takeoff as to their expectations. After all,
they’re an option, not obligatory. Otherwise, for much less, you could slug down a pint or so of good sour mash when the carnival comes to town, then ride the tilt-a-whirl and/or other punishing “rides”. Bring wet
wipes and plastic bags so you can “freshen up.” If projectile vomiting ensues, it’s considered bad form to “hit” other patrons. If you’re looking
for other thrills, you can purchase a ride in an AT-6 or in a P51 Mustang.
You may also take flight training on either airplane. This is at the airport
at Kisimmee, FL. Other options are undoubtedly available.