Nice note about the Slant Bar & the Feather

I thought this was a nice note:

I finally used a Feather blade for the very first time in my Merkur Heavy Duty Classic Slant Bar razor for a full six consecutive days starting with Nancy Boy shave cream and then using a variety of shave creams and soaps and, for the very first time, I actually enjoyed using the slant bar razor. Joe Lerch is right. The Feather blade transforms the slant bar shave from an unacceptably harsh experience into a comfortable experience similar to shaving with a laser beam without smelling burnt hair. The slant bar razor with a Feather blade is absolutely not for a beginner and requires the lightest pressure, a practiced double edge razor technique with accurate blade angle control, and more concentration than the straight bar razor. My previous attempts with the slant bar using Merkur or US Personna blades lasting at most four consecutive days yielded dreaded harsh shaves with the blade trying to dig into my face near my chin even with gradual beard reduction. Since my double edge razor technique has evolved, shave cream and soap cushion or protection is less important than meringue-like lather. I tried a new Feather blade in my straight bar razor for the first time on Saturday, September 30, 2006 in the evening using a bath soap I sometimes like to use for shaving (an occasional disorder I seem unable to shake even with Taylor’s Rose and Nancy Boy shave creams and C&E Sweet Almond Oil shave soap in my rotation) with my Proraso Omega shave brush resulting in gobs of lather and a comfortable and very close shave which took much longer than usual to stubble up. In either straight or slant bar razor, the Feather blade’s sharpness results in very little cutting resistance and close shaves with longer stubble up times. The Feather blade also lasts longer than the Merkur or US Personna blades. One potential negative to using the Feather blade may be that I might eventually skip a day shaving because it yields such a close shave. I may very likely end up being a regular Feather blade user.

Ken Mehlman, yet another GOP liar

Josh Marshall spells it out clearly:

Ken Mehlman, defending the GOP handling of the Foley scandal, today on CNN:

The fact is the speaker and our leadership could not have been more aggressive. The moment they found out about this, they gave Mark Foley the political death penalty.They said, get out of Congress or we’re going to throw you out. They called in the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate.

He just makes this stuff up, doesn’t he? Sits in on a conference call sometime Saturday evening with other clever guys and gals and just starts pulling responses to the expected Sunday morning questions out of the air.

Recall that Speaker Hastert has already admitted that Foley was gone so fast they didn’t have time to tell him to resign. They never told Foley, Quit or we’re going to kick you out. Simply never happened. It was Nancy Pelosi who first moved to refer the matter to the Ethics Committee, not any GOP leader. So I don’t know what exactly Mehlman considers to have been “aggressive” action by the House leadership because in fact they took no unprompted action.

Recall, too, that Hastert’s letter to the Attorney General requesting an investigation came after Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) had already publicly called for an federal investigation earlier that same day.

Like I said, Mehlman just makes this stuff up.

I think it’s a bad sign when a political party depends so heavily on lying to make its case. (Also a bad sign for the traditional media that they fail to spot and label the lies.)

News to me, too: air strikes in Iraq

Josh Marshall comments on what is apparently an on-going strategy in fighting the Iraq insurgency: air strikes. Now you wouldn’t think that would be useful in that kind of war—and you’d be right—but it does help explain the 655,000 Iraqi dead since our invasion and pre-emptive war.

For the GOP, it’s all about the Benjamins

No wonder it’s the Party of Corruption. The next GOP Majority/Minority leader in the Senate just loves to raise money. Josh Marshall, take it away.

How good is green tea? Let me count the ways.

Or, rather, let someone else count the ways. I didn’t know about the losing-weight benefit. Or some of the others, for that matter.

That crazy toy is now available

I blogged about it, and now the toy is here! It’s a speedboat, it’s a race car, it’s a plane! Very wild! (Video at the links—NSFW: second link is a TV commercial.)

Could it be that Bush lied?

Josh Marshall has the story:

Didn’t President Bush, in a much ballyhoed press conference in September, declare that the CIA’s secret prisoners were being transferred to Gitmo for trial by military tribunals? That is what he said, right?

So what’s this about?

A suspected al Qaeda leader, accused of being involved in September 11 and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings, has been imprisoned in a secret U.S. jail for the past year, Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported on Sunday.Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told El Pais.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Spain declined to comment on the report.

Setmarian’s 2005 capture was reported in May of this year after the United States put a $5 million bounty on the head of the alleged founder of al Qaeda’s Spanish network.

A photograph of the red-haired Setmarian has been removed from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Intelligence’s most-wanted Web page.

Not that making it to Gitmo guarantees any sort of due process, as this NYT piece today makes clear:

Mr. Ginco, a college student living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States.But rather than help Mr. Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by his torturers.

Sigh.

Possibly nerdish: pocket caliper

This pocket caliper is precision made of high-strength, Fiberglas-reinforced plastic. It opens to 3″ outside measurement capacity and has a 4″ rule graduated in 16ths on back. Easily carried with you. May be nerdish—hard to tell.

Save paper: print 4 pages per page

This software (Windows only, part of why I don’t get a Mac) costs $50, but it does do quite a few neat tricks:

Print Preview: Universal print preview with editing capability. Easily add blank pages, delete pages, and re-sequence jobs.

Ink Saver: Provides options to convert colored text to black and skip graphics.

Multiple Pages on a single sheet: Print 2, 4 or 8 pages on a single sheet of paper.

Watermarks Headers and Footers: Watermark, header and footer option allows documents to be marked with the date, time, system variables or custom text.

Forms and Letterheads: Allows the simplified creation of electronic forms and letterhead. The preview feature shows how output will appear before you print it to ensure correct alignment.

Useful info: how to write in bed

Mark Twain, IIRC, used to write in bed—but he didn’t use a laptop (so far as we know). Writing in bed with a laptop is obviously important to those who have strain-caused aches from long hours sitting at a keyboard. Here are some ways to write comfortably in bed.

Top 100 Project Gutenberg books

If you do get an eBook reader, you’re going to be interested in Project Gutenberg: ebook versions of books  in the public domain. Here are the top ten of the top 100, computed daily based on number of downloads from distinct IP addresses:

1. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser (737)
2. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (386)
3. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci (361)
4. Ulysses by James Joyce (278)
5. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (274)
6. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (251)
7. How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin (208)
8. The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi (197)
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (185)
10. The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (172)

I bet Britain is sorry that Blair backed Bush

Now Britain is having to scrounge for helicopters to support their troops in Afghanistan: the US won’t allow them to use any of ours. “Special relationship” indeed.

Britain is so short of helicopters in Afghanistan that military chiefs are being forced to scour the world for civilian aircraft to support its troops after the US rejected a plea to help plug the shortfall.

An ageing fleet of just eight Chinooks is working around the clock to supply and reinforce soldiers in remote outposts facing waves of Taliban attacks. The only Chinook in the Falklands was taken away for use in the campaign.

The revelations come in the wake of the outburst by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the army chief, against the Government’s military strategy last week.

The Independent on Sunday can also reveal that reconnaissance and intelligence missions in Afghanistan are being affected by the lack of smaller and more flexible helicopters. But senior military officials said that when UK commanders asked for temporary deployment of US helicopters in Afghanistan, they were told there were none to spare.

How beauty standards got shifted

This little movie shows how our contemporary perception of beauty in women has been shaped and shifted.