0100011101100101011011110111001001100111011001010010000001010111001011
10001000000100001001110101011100110110100000100000011010010111001100100
00001101111011011100010000001101000011010010111001100100000011101110110
00010111100100100000011011110111010101110100001000010010000001010111011
0000101101000011011110110111100100001
(If you need to translate it, I suggest that you use the almighty Google)
I don’t recall why or when, but I used eBay to sell off my Bakelite Morse code telegraph key (very much like this one). I honestly don’t even remember WHY I had it – I just did. It was cool, especially since it also had the Morse code “key” right on it – making it easy to learn.
I regret never learning Morse code. Sure, I know SOS (… — …) but that’s it. It was like French in high school – seductive, alluring, but out of my reach for reasons I didn’t understand. I understand now, but thanks to the internet, I don’t need to learn it.
.- … -.- / .- -. -.. / –. — — –. .-.. . / .– .. .-.. .-.. / .–. .-. — …- .. -.. . .-.-.-
But the point of this post? John McCain. If you’ve watched him in the debates recently, you might have noticed the same thing I did: he blinks. A lot.
If you think about John’s service to this country – something that might have come up at some point in this election season – you’ll find that he was a POW. And one of the things that POW’s were often made to do – by coercion or even by simply breaking them – was to record a propagandized “confession.” In some cases, such as Jeremiah Denton, they were able to use Morse code to send a message to people watching the video. John McCain made one such message, although it apparently didn’t include a “secret” message.
I bring this up because of the blinking. Is John McCain sending us all a message? There’s hours of footage of him talking, both at debates and just doing stump speeches and campaign stops. Does anyone have the time to look at a video or two and see if there’s a pattern? If we can get a “transcript” of his blinks, perhaps we can figure out his message to his “friends”….
Interestingly, when I was writing this, a Google search on the terms “morse code pow film” and the first result was “Film Shows McCain’s Release as POW.” There is also a forum post on Snopes that discusses McCain possibly using Morse code during his propaganda film – apparently he didn’t.
Over on Democratic Underground they discuss his blinkiness – and someone mentions Morse code there. They seem to be joking about it, but I don’t see any evidence out there that anyone has done any actual checking on this.
Leaving the politics out of this for the moment, I think it’s an interesting challenge: look at his blinks and see if he’s sending a message – consciously or sub-consciously. While we’re at it, we could take a look at Barack Obama’s blinks, just to make things far.
Anyone up for the challange?
Commentary: Sexist treatment of Palin must end
Oh PLEASE. They’re not being sexist – they’re just afraid of what she’ll say when she opens her mouth. Why else have they been so controlling about her public appearances?
I think that at this point in the campaign – especially with McCain now “suspending” his campaign to worry about the economy – we’re all past Caribou Barbie and pitbulls wearing lipstick. She gives bad interviews. Deal with it. Let’s move on to our failing economy, shall we?
If you haven’t seen it yet, go over to NBC and watch the SNL skit with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton. Go on, I’ll wait.
You liked it, right? Funny stuff. I’ve said for a while – although apparently not here – that I think that Palin and Fey look alike. Especially when Jen and I watched “Baby Mama
In other TV news…. The BBC has an article about how the current campaigns between Obama and McCain seem to mirror those found in the sixth season
I wonder if the McCain camp has watched the West Wing
Barack Obama recently described McCain’s gum-flapping about how he’s different from King Bush II as “Putting lipstick on a pig” – it may look better, but deep down, it’s still a pig. See the Urban Dictionary definition if you’re not sure I’m right. Or any of the thousands of pages that come up when you search the phrase.
The problem is, as CNN points out….
Sen. Barack Obama’s reference to “lipstick on a pig” has Republicans demanding an apology and Democrats accusing Sen. John McCain of a “pathetic attempt” to play the gender card.
McCain’s campaign said Obama’s remarks were offensive and a slap at Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin — despite the fact that the Arizona senator himself used the phrase last year to describe a policy proposal of Hillary Clinton’s.
So if McCain says it, it’s ok, but if Obama says it, then he’s insulting Palin apparently – but mostly due to Palin’s recent remarks about Hockey moms and pit bulls.
Whatever. The campaign should be about the issues, not the personalities. I look forward to the first – possibly only – Vice Presidential debate, if only to see just how much new knowledge the Republicans have managed to cram into Palin since they chose her….
Since it was such a lovely day for driving today, I decided to go take care of a customer in New Haven. Initially I didn’t want to go, but they were having problems with their router since yesterday afternoon and were rather anxious to get online – a feeling I know all too well.
Traffic was pretty light, considering Tropical Depression Hanna was on the way to destroy life as we know it. I had also just had the struts in the car replaced to alleviate a very expensive sound coming from their general vicinity, so I felt that I should do what I could to pay them off somehow.
About half way through West Haven – ironically near the location of the “Vagina” billboard * – I was passed by an SUV.
As you can see, it’s a Hummer H3, one of the more fuel efficient vehicles in the Hummer line. Normally, the black ones don’t look to bad, but there was something different about this one. I don’t know if it was the brush guards, the “lived in” look that it had (like it had actually been driven off-road), or the vague sense that whoever was driving it had actually served their country and had spent more than a few months behind the wheel of a military Hummer. What I do know is that it stood out – more than a vehicle that gets approx. 14 mpg doing 70+ down the highway does. What you can see in the photo is an arrow pointing to where their lone bumper sticker is.
What does the bumper sticker say?
Now, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the person driving the fuel-inefficient vehicle on the road was a Republican, but somehow, I still was. From what I understand, a rather large percentage of the people serving in the armed forces are Republican, despite the fact that their Commander In Chief keeps putting them in harms way. Guess I still hold out hope for some people out there to have a decent head on their shoulders…..
* When the “Vagina Monologues” came to New Haven, they paid for a billboard along I-95 in West Haven that said VAGINA in huge letters, and monologs much smaller. Obviously done to get attention, it made headlines across the state, and, to some extent, across the region. Panty-twisted conservatives across the nation got their panties twisted even more tightly, and there was much griping, complaining and gnashing of teeth. Jen and I went to the show and had a wonderful time. (top)
BBC NEWS | Americas | Rare stamp ‘used on US post vote’
A rare stamp worth as much as $200,000 may be on an envelope sealed in a ballot box after the US mid-term elections, poll officials say.
Officials in Broward County, Florida, say they saw a famous “Inverted Jenny” stamp while reviewing postal ballots.
About 700 of the stamps were mistakenly printed in 1918 with an upside down illustration. Just 100 went on sale.
But it will be 22 months before laws will permit the box with the envelope to be reopened and the stamp checked.
The original stamps bear a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 plane, known as a Jenny, which was used for training pilots in World War I and later became an airmail plane.
I can only imagine that any and all philatelists (stamp collectors) in Florida are rushing to their collections to see if their stamp is missing. Well, if they had one in the first place:
Four “Inverted Jenny” stamps sold for almost $3m last year
Two out of four kids have ear infections. Nice.
Lamont lost to Lieberman – I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised. I really don’t want to get into the debate about all this crap, but I agree that Lamont lost because he made the election about Lieberman, not the issues. Either way, we’re not going to leave Iraq anytime soon, and I honestly don’t know what the heck Lieberman has to do with that – HE isn’t the one who got us into this quagmire, Bush is. Let’s focus on getting him out of the Oval office, then we can address Joe’s problems.
Britney Spears: yes, she’s getting a divorce. Yeah. I think I already addressed this. The reason I mention it: she drives a lot of traffic to my site. Not her personally, of course….. People looking for photos of her. I’ll save you the trouble: look here – they’re all in one place. I might add some to the page. Why?
I used to include the posts about Britney in the “Posts” category. Now that page is about 2mb in size. When the search engines spider the site, they put that page in their index under Britney Spears, even though it’s not really appropriate. I’ve taken the liberty of removing those posts from the page, but also of using a robots.txt file to block spider access to that page. Since doing that, traffic to that page – and my monthly bandwidth usage – have shot way down. Coincidence? I think not.
I’ve noticed that the Britney page is making it’s way up the “popular pages” list, but not quite as quick as I expected. I wonder how long it will take for the photos page to make the list? Let’s find out.