Inedible Ink

I have at least four decent ways to post this link, but I can’t decide which to go with:

What Does The Prayer Really Say? “Some pig!”
Alabama Boy Kills 1,051-Pound Monster Pig, Bigger Than ‘Hogzilla’

The boy’s site at Monsterpig.com is complete with pics of the handgun he did this with.
The Charlotte’s Web angle: The title of Fr.Z.’s post over at What Does The Prayer Really Say? is “Some pig!” I presume that he’s quoting Charlotte, the titular word web weaving spider from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. And, since people will believe anything they read… What if Charlotte had written “set the pig free.” ? How long does it take a wild hog to grow to 1,051 lbs.?

The Muppets in the Wild angle: I wouldn’t like competition from Father Z. in the “Catholic Apologist featuring the occasional Muppet in the Wild” - publishing marketplace. When he blogs in Latin, he isn’t making the words up as he goes, like my Habemus Saponis! post of 2 years ago. There ain’t room in this column for the both of us, John.

The Hunting Feral Animals angle: There’s something inherently funny about hunting pigs, cats, and cows. Ok, so I don’t have a “Hunting Feral Cows” post to link to, just a bunch of old shot-the-cow jokes and these: ‘Lunker’ Cat Weighs 33 Pounds Scratch Cat fever Wisconsin’s feral pigs If I went with the Hunting Feral Animals angle, I could have used this recent WSJ story on the Great Nebraska Pig Hunt.

The Fauxtography angle: I have a keen nose for fake photography. This one doesn’t require training in Photoshop or any specialized photographic knowledge. It only requires that your grandmother took you fishing once or twice. If she did, she told you to hold your prized fish at arm’s length towards her camera. Due to an effect of perspective called “foreshortening”, “forced perspective” or simply “I crush your head” subjects closest to the camera, or eye, appear largest. This makes your dinky fish look like something to be proud of, makes the heads of people 12 feet away fit between your thumb and forefinger, and makes Jamison’s big pig look blurry even bigger. In camera fakery, this is the oldest gag going, and Jamison’s dad should know better than to get his kid to kneel that far behind the big pig because the camera focuses on the boy and the blurry pig gives away the trick. Happened to grandma and the fish too.

The official position of this blog is that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) is bad.

Combine that with  “you can have my free market economy when you’ve pried it from my cold dead fingers“  and I’m none too pleased with this:

WIBW - HomePage
The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

via Coyote Blog who calls this the worst of both worlds where the goverment fails to test more than one percent of beef AND interferes with privately funded market-driven testing.

An interview with Marine lance corporal Trevor Scelso:

Sierra Vista Herald | The Bisbee Daily Review

Clipped from the International Herald Tribune, one story with both Marines and Dartmouth.

Dartmouth president helping put wounded veterans in college - International Herald Tribune
When he first met James Wright, the president of Dartmouth College, two years ago, Samuel Crist was in a hospital bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, recuperating from gunshot wounds from a firefight in Falluja, Iraq.
-*-*-*-*-*-
To the few Dartmouth alumni serving overseas, Wright sends care packages of maple-sugar candy and Robert Frost poems.

Although the new program was not intended to recruit for Dartmouth, Wright is delighted at the prospect of having a few former marines on campus next fall. One applied under early-decision rules and was accepted, entirely apart from the program. One came through a counselor in the new program. And Crist wrote to Wright after their meeting, developing the relationship that led to his transfer plans.

-*-*-*- marks my story snipping.
via: Marine Corps News Room

Bill Tammeus has some questions for you about prayer: Call it a meme if you must, but I’m passing them along to you whatever you call it.

Faith Matters
I’ve got lots of questions for you about prayer and events like these, but I’ll try to limit myself to a few basic ones:

* What difference does it make if one person prays or a billion people pray if they’re essentially praying for the same thing?

* That is, does God count and respond only when the prayer volume hits critical mass?

* Is prayer meant to change God, change the world or change the people praying?

* Are well-written, theogically vetted prayers better than extemporaneous utterances?

* Do you feel differently about prayer if you know that people in Poland and India and Japan and Colombia are praying with you?

I’d like to hear your answers, so I’ll leave the comments box open for a while. Respond in the comments or trackback from your place, whichever you prefer.

My own answers are forthcoming, I’ll spill my own beans after you guys spill yours. A peek at my ideas is in a post called Power of Prayer. It’s longish.

Please pardon the gratuitous attention grabbing with trackbacks and links, but this is one of those rare things.
MWBH

IC

JA O

Welcome the men and women of the 3/4 home.

3/4 comes home
By LANCE CPL. NICOLE A LAVINE / Special to The Trail Wednesday, May 16, 2007 4:21 PM PDT

MCAGCC — Marines and sailors with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment returned home to a sea of friends and family members at Victory Field from Thursday, May 3 through Sunday, May 6 after a nine-month deployment to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

More than 800 Marines and sailors returned home from what was originally scheduled to be a seven-month deployment but was extended after President Bush announced unit extensions to increase forces in Iraq.
-*-*-*-*-
Rita McKinney, a proud grandmother of several Marines, said she was welcoming six grandsons home that evening.

Although only one of the Marines who came home was her biological grandson, she claimed the other five as adoptive grandsons, having known them for years and bringing them into her home for holidays.

I liked that bit about Rita’s “adoptive” grandsons.

The little Iraqi village called Wadi al-Sahara has a few unique features. First, it’s made of shipping containers, you don’t often see entire towns built of shipping containers. Second, it’s in California.

This is where Marines headed for Iraq train in counterinsurgency, house to house searches and combat avoidance.
The NPR page has a link to the complete audio of the story where Lt. Col. Kennedy gets to speak his mind on the matter.

NPR : Simulated City Preps Marines for Reality of Iraq
Lt. Col. Andrew Kennedy is the counterinsurgency guru at the Marine Corp base in 29 Palms, Calif. He’s a big man, fit, barrel-chested and usually chomping on an unlit cigar. His mantra goes something like this: “It’s always better to capture than to kill and it’s always better to turn than to capture.”

Kennedy says if you kill an enemy, you get nothing. If you capture him, you might learn something. But if you win him over, turn him, get him to help you, you get a valuable spy.

Kennedy teaches this lesson in a classroom that is basically a large air-conditioned trailer in the middle of the California desert. His students are Marines on their way to Iraq — often for a second or third time. Kennedy now stresses how not to fight.

“There are going to be times when you need to take a deep breath and not go head to head, “he tells his students. “You need to foresee the opportunity for conflict, and avoid it.”

I can’t know for sure, but I get the sense that NPR Correspondent Guy Raz or his producer were impressed by Kennedy. Possibly that mantra “always better to turn than to capture.” applies to media as well.

The three-seven was in the Mojave Viper training at the time this story was recorded. That battalion left for Iraq this week. (link)

Go Chuck:

Abusive Rhetoric

By Chuck Colson

We believe it is our particular duty to condemn the bigotry we are now witnessing in view of the history of anti-Catholicism in our nation. It is a stain on the Protestant Christian conscience….

Thanks to Mere Comments.

Amnesty International is all for Human Rights and everything…

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
WHEREAS recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world

It seems, though, that they’ve decided you’ve got to be a born human to have those rights.
First Things has the story on A.I.’s very un-public support of abortion.

He’s my favorite mononym, trouble-maker, and criminal.  Banksy has snuck more stuff into a museum:

Table of Malcontents - Wired Blogs
Famed street artist and museum subversive Banksy has pulled off his latest stunt: inserting a fake primitive rock painting into a British Museum exhibit of Roman Britain art.

No one knows how long the exhibit — a depiction of the famous Peckham Rock Painting, depicting early man rolling their shopping trolley on wobbly wheels to an arrow-pierced buffalo — was on display.