Service restored at main site

Jon just sent me an email that we're live again back at Quotulatiousness. I hope that I won't need to use this backup too often, although it's been handy to have somewhere to post items while the main blog has been offline.

Sounding off Royally

Doug Mataconis isn't happy that some woman called "Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor-Mountbatten will be visiting the free and independent United States of America". Apparently, visits from certain foreign heads of state (like the Queen of Canada) are more irritating than others:

Okay, let’s get this straight people.

We won the Revolutionary War.

We owe no alliegience to the British Throne.

When it comes to the British Royal Family (to the exent you can call the Buckingham Place rendition of “Married With Children” a family) we owe them nothing.

No respect.

Nothing.

Okay, to be fair, Doug is actually objecting to the somewhat ridiculous lengths to which some Americans go to honour royalty. Respect for a visiting monarch is fine, but it's perhaps going too far to treat them like Hollywood actors . . . (tongue very firmly in cheek).

Still all quiet back at the ranch

No change to the status over at bolditalic.com, we're still offline with no official prognosis for return to normal.

Footage of NASA's bad-luck train

NASA is having a heck of a time getting a set of solid rocket boosters from Utah to Florida, as detailed in this CNN story.

H/T to "John the Mc".

More on the militarization of local police forces

Radley Balko provides more background on the increasing use of military equipment and tactics by civilian police forces:

The Pentagon giveaway program began in the late 1980s, and is almost certainly responsible for the dramatic rise in the number of SWAT teams across the country, which led to the 1500 percent increase in the number of total deployments over the last 25 years, and to the increasing use of paramilitary tactics for nonviolent crimes. Many criminal justice experts say the program, along with the fact that SWAT teams and narcotics officers are often trained by former members of elite military groups like the Army Rangers or Navy Seals is responsible for the "cowboy" mentality that pervades many SWAT and narcotics units.

It isn't hard to see why. Outfit domestic police officers in military clothing, arm them with military gear, train them in military tactics taught by ex-military personnel, then tell them they're fighting a "war" on drugs, and we shouldn't be the least bit surprised when they treat city streets like battlefields, drug offenders like enemy combatants, and victims like Katherine Johnston and Isaac Singletary as mere casualties of war. Posse Comitatus isn't some quaint relic from the Civil War era. It shows a clear understanding between the two institutions' missions. One is charged with protecting our rights. The other is charged with annihilating an enemy. It's probably a good idea not to get them confused, no?

QotD: Allergies

It's allergy season — but you knew that, if you have them. Your lovely spring days are spent fighting an Invisible Misery Cloud that makes your head leak. If you don't have allergies, you don't care, and you've already stopped reading, so we can talk about you now that you're gone. Has he gained weight? Maybe it's just those shoes that make him look fat. And that tie! Jeez. Last time I saw something like that, it had been run over on 35W by a semi. Anyway: I don't have allergies, but I live with someone who is allergic to the world every spring, and it's horrible. She uses eyedrops to combat the pollen, and from her expression they're composed of Drano and lemon juice. Then there are the drugs; make you feel like your head is filled with confused bees. It's hard to see her suffer, so I don't spend a lot of time at home in the spring.

James Lileks, "Allergic to Meteors", Star Tribune, 2007-05-01

Main site still down

No change over at the main site yet. I'll keep you posted as I find out myself.

Latest news from Featherstone

The most recent newsletter from Featherstone includes:

THE F'ING WINERY TOUR
Join Featherstone, Flat Rock and Fielding (all the F'ing wineries) for a weekend full of phenomenally fun winery tours, filled with fantastic, flavourful, wines paired with fabulous finger-licking good food bites. Tour dates: May 5 & 6 from 11-5 pm daily. Passports can be purchased for $10.00 each and include:
- chance to enter a draw for an f'ing good prize
- complementary tasting of two fantastic wines at each winery, served with a funky twist.
Featherstone's f'ing food pairing will be focaccia topped with Upper Canada Triple Crème Brie and sun dried tomato pesto.

They're also releasing their first-ever Sauvignon Blanc:

The newly released 2006 Featherstone Sauvignon Blanc VQA has lots of tropical fruit flavours with the typical grassy notes: it is zesty, refreshing and incredibly drinkable. As wine writer Gord Stimmel says: "My top scoring wines do confirm excellence again in our local wineries. I'd like to share my winners with you … Featherstone 2006 Sauvignon Blanc shows the typical straw/grassy nose, with an exotic touch of kiwi, leading into flavours of zesty lime and lemon, with a crisp finish."

It's a summer's day in a glass, full of vitality and spirit. Enjoy slightly chilled with a patio lunch, as pre-dinner sipping or with seafood appetizers.

More on the Johnston case

Radley Balko comes out with both guns blazing:

While an innocent, elderly woman lay bleeding, handcuffed, and dying on the floor of her own home due to their malfeasance, these animals went about planting drugs to implicate her, and concocting a story to save their own hides. Every case these officers ever worked on needs to be reopened. And that's just getting started. A police department that could produce these three dirty cops, and allow them to operate, is a department that has almost certainly produced many more. It would be awfully coincidental if the only three bad drug cops at APD all happened to be working together this particular night, and happened to get caught on this particular raid.

Johnston's murder should also be a wake-up call for those who instinctively believe initial police accounts of what happened during one of these raids. I suspect that if Kathryn Johnston had been a 22-year old innocent man instead of an 88 (or 92, depending on who's reporting)-year old innocent woman, we may still not know exactly what happened in that house.

Original post here.

Draft reactions

Vikings War Cry has a summary of what the experts have been saying about the players the Vikings drafted on the weekend. Overall, they seem to think that Minnesota got some good quality players for their picks, although several feel that the Vikings should have taken a quarterback in the first couple of rounds.

The Star Tribune's Kevin Seifert sums up the draft.

Nostalgic for the future?

Remember those personal flying cars from the "what will you be driving in the year 2000" articles and the Moon vacations we were all supposed to be taking by now? Paleo-Future wants to exorcise those thoughts for you.

H/T to William A. Wenrich for the link.

Blog situation still unchanged

Jon is reporting that the bandwidth issues still haven't cleared up: even with the blog shut down, there's more than 20Mb/day of traffic. No idea if the old site will be back soon.