Well, today’s the big day for Iron Mikey. He has to explain his behavior at last week’s press conference to the Nevada Boxing Commission.

I was a little disappointed in the contest response, but here are the results:

In addition to my original post title (“But honest, folks, I thought that it was my own foot in my mouth–it usually is”):

Matthew Renner submits:

He said he hadn’t had a bite all day.

and we had five entries from “Charlie”:

Y’know, ever since the Holyfield thing…well, you know what they say: “Once you’ve had living human flesh, you never go back.”

I didn’t mean nothin’ by it…I was just givin’ him a good-luck hickey.

OK, OK, here’s why it happened: all I was doin’ was… (pointing) Hey, look, Don King’s havin’ a heart attack! (runs out the side door)

Nuh-uh, it was really a snake that bit him, not me. I was tryin’ to suck the poison out, ya stoopid.

Wasn’t me, it was Marv Albert.

I’m not sure what time the hearing is, so you may still have one more chance to help out. Just click on the “comment” link.

[Update at 4:30 PM PST]

Well, he didn’t get his license back (boo hoo).

He should have tried some of our excuses. At least it would have been more entertaining.

Well, today’s the big day for Iron Mikey. He has to explain his behavior at last week’s press conference to the Nevada Boxing Commission.

I was a little disappointed in the contest response, but here are the results:

In addition to my original post title (“But honest, folks, I thought that it was my own foot in my mouth–it usually is”):

Matthew Renner submits:

He said he hadn’t had a bite all day.

and we had five entries from “Charlie”:

Y’know, ever since the Holyfield thing…well, you know what they say: “Once you’ve had living human flesh, you never go back.”

I didn’t mean nothin’ by it…I was just givin’ him a good-luck hickey.

OK, OK, here’s why it happened: all I was doin’ was… (pointing) Hey, look, Don King’s havin’ a heart attack! (runs out the side door)

Nuh-uh, it was really a snake that bit him, not me. I was tryin’ to suck the poison out, ya stoopid.

Wasn’t me, it was Marv Albert.

I’m not sure what time the hearing is, so you may still have one more chance to help out. Just click on the “comment” link.

[Update at 4:30 PM PST]

Well, he didn’t get his license back (boo hoo).

He should have tried some of our excuses. At least it would have been more entertaining.

A sanitized version of Kucinich’ anti-mind-control-and-earthquake-creation bill was reintroduced in the House last week.

It has been purged of all references to mind-control rays and tectonic weaponry, but it retains all the wacky notions about space arms control.

Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, has a wonderful rant about working computer help desks and dealing with computer users who are too dumb to breathe.

It’s also her birthday. All together now:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MEGAN!

It turns out she’s one day (and probably many years) younger than me.

Several people have pointed out this article in the WaPo about the disillusionment of many formerly jihading muslims in Pakistan. This paragraph caught my eye particularly:

“Sufi Mohammad let down the people,” said Khisda Rahman, 35, in Chakdara. “He took all these guys and now they are dead or in prison. But he ran away and came back. People are asking why he didn’t sacrifice himself.”

When Sufi Mohammad organized the convoys that passed through Chakdara, “the whole town was celebrating,” Rahman said. “Now they are sad they did. They will never follow him again.”

Compare with these paragraphs from this web site:

Urban…promised them the Church’s blessing, the aid of God, and the certainly of being taking immediately into heaven for those who fell in the attempt.

The crowd was swept up in the call, and the cry of Deus vult! (“Gods wills it!”) spread far and wide. Almost all classes and nationalities of Europeans responded in a movement far greater and more varied than Urban may have expected. It is unlikely that anyone realized how well this call suited the needs and predisposition of the Europeans of the time.

It is ironic that so many Islamicists accuse the West of going on another crusade against them. The reality is that, just as Christianity went through its dark ages, so now is Islam (or at least some virulent sects of it) in their own. And the response is the same–a distraction of the peasants from their (government-imposed) peasantry with the excitement of a Holy War (in this case, Jihad or a Crescentade).

Fortunately, our communications and information transfer is much better now than it was in the European middle ages, so the lesson may be learned after a single dramatic failure, instead of having multiple Crescentades.

who are concerned about us equating Arafat with terrorists. Horrors!

Foreign Minister Anna Lindh days:

“This is just insane. It contradicts the entire peace process…and can only lead to outright war in the Middle East.”

Yes, let’s continue to live in a fantasy world that allows the Palestinians to continue to dismantle themselves and Israeli civilians. That’s a lot better than a war.

The Reason article I cited about the press and the military is now available on line.

Josh Marshall makes an interesting statement in his comment on my recent post about Mr. Clinton’s friends and business associates.

He states, as though it were a fact, that:

The post (on another blog) lists Marc Rich, the McDougals, and even people like David Hale, who, if you actually follow these things, you know had little if any actual connection to Clinton — as opposed to fictive connections manufactured later, etc. etc. etc.

I will grant that Marc Rich was probably not a close associate of Mr. Clinton, since he wasn’t allowed in the country (as far as we know)–Mr. Clinton simply received money in exchange for a pardon, on at least the appearance.

And it is possible, if one wishes to engage in extreme wishful thinking, to believe that Mr. Clinton was technically innocent of any crimes in Whitewater (though it strains the credulity of anyone truly familiar with the record). But to think that nothing shady occurred, or that Mr. Clinton had little or no connection to David Hale or the McDougals, who were his documented business partners, is delusional.

My respect for Mr. Marshall’s opinions has diminished considerably.

I don’t think so, but Yasser “Jihad” Arafat apparently does.

Responding to harsh criticism by US officials, Arafat also made an appeal yesterday to the American people in a program on the Qatari satellite channel Al- Jazeera, asking them to compare the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation to their own against British forces in the American War of Independence.

“Did you ever accept the British occupation of the United States,” Arafat asked. “Didn’t George Washington fight, along with his people, until they freed the United States?”

Obviously, my education of colonial history is deficient. I can’t recall reading about that part where England had millions of people living in cities on the east coast, and George Washington had the colonials strap black-powder balls to themselves and walk into New York shops to set them off.

I also must have been asleep in class on the day when they described how George Washington made speeches in English feigning conciliation and victimhood, and different speeches in colonialspeak urging his followers to drive all English men, women and children into the Atlantic.

And I must have cut class the day they explained how Washington, listening to the wise council of the French, and Spanish and Italians, urged him and his followers to withdraw from their own land to Mexico, and wait for the ultimate war that would defeat those evil Englishpeople living in America, after which they would be able to have all of the territory, even that part of it which had been legally granted by treaty. And that when that war was launched, and ignominiously lost, that George Washington started up bands of terrorists to kill innocent English civilians.

I was apparently taught by some historical revisionist that George Washington was fighting an empire across the sea, and that he waged war on the armed forces of that country, many of them mercenaries–not on innocent civilians in Philadelphia.

But I’m sure that now that Yasser has straightened us out, he will receive appropriate respect from world leaders. Maybe he’ll even get another well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize…

[Update at 3:30 PM]

UPI Columnist Jim Bennett provides an alternate point of view:

Actually, there were millions of English people living on the Eastern seaboard. Washington was one of them. The equivalent of the Arabs were the Indians, who did try terrorist tactics for a long time. In fairness, that was the way they always fought. And the surrounding powers did try to aid the Indians, while mostly exploiting them for their own strategic purposes.

But I don’t suppose Arafat would find the analogy of use in appealing to
Americans. It’s also not hopeful to the Palestinians.