New Sleeping Arrangements

As a followup to last week where I noted that the cats are not thrilled with New England winters, I present some of the other new sleeping arrangements the ladies have come up with. Chloe, for example, has taken to sleeping under my desk:

This has the drawback of she occasionally nips my toes when she wants something, like a drink or a piece of salmon. Meanwhile, Daphne has found something more akin to a perch:

And no, you don’t get to ask what a giant Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is doing at Villa MartiniPundit.

As Andrew Sullivan Evaporates

Readers of this blog from the beginning (way back in May) will recall that Andrew Sullivan was once at the top of my blogroll. In truth, at that time I was wondering if he deserved it, but I was going as much on past performance as anything else, and figured he was in a slump.

The slump proved to be permament.

When he comes back – if he comes back – I doubt he’ll have the audience he once did. It was not just that his blog degenerated into all gay marriage all the time – it was and is an important issue and if as a gay man Sullivan wanted to blog on it that was his business. It was when the President came out in support of the FMA and Sullivan not only opposed the President on that issue but suddenly every other issue as well.

The intellectual dishonesty of that was breathtaking and exploded his credibility with me entirely. He moved to the bottom of the blogroll and eventually off it entirely. So I haven’t been reading him much – indeed a headline that grabs my attention loses it the instant I see his name on the byline – but have been amused by the continued attention the blogosphere pays to this charlatan.

I always felt his pledge drives were a bit sleazy and never contributed myself, but to take a month off after dunning one’s readers for 120 grand is despicable. This after getting them to cough up 80 grand a few months before. Then to take an indefinite hiatus a couple months after that to run off to Europe is tantamount to fraud. Those who contributed must have a pretty sour taste in their mouths right now.

Michelle Malkin – who apparently has been the target of some of Sullivan’s puerile humor – has a roundup of reactions from the blogosphere. I’ll admit, I’m also wasting some pixels on the guy, but it still amazes me how much credence – nay respect – he’s still given from the old guard like Glenn Reynolds. Someone said Sullivan was blogging before blogging was cool and that’s true. That and 200 grand will get you a nice trip to Europe.

On the Unhappy Global ‘Elite’

Victor Davis Hanson is at it again, slicing through the cognitive dissonance to bring tonal clarity:

Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert’s show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge — a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.

Second, political powerlessness follows from ideological exhaustion. Communism and Marxism are dead. Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs. Castro and North Korea are not classless utopias but thugocracies run by megalomaniac dictators who the world prays will die any minute. The global Left knows that the Cold War is over and was lost by the Left, and that Eastern Europeans and Central Americans probably cherish the memory of a Ronald Reagan far more than that of a Francois Mitterrand or Willy Brandt.

A must read, but then you knew that.

Move Over DVD

Just when you thought that massive DVD collection you’ve been assembling from Wal-Mart’s bargain bin was going to last forever, the propeller heads up the ante. They’re calling it HVD.

Six companies, including Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics, have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical disc. A TB-size disc would certainly compress movie collections. The consortium said an HVD disc could hold as much data as 200 standard DVDs and transfer data at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD.

Sounds grand but they better make the players backwards compatible. DVD adoption rates have been even higher than CDs were in the 80s and a lot of people have a lot of them. Of course, by that point, we’ll all be watching video stored on our Petabyte capacity hard drives.