The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog Published Continuously Since ‘02

This is the final entry to the Fire Ant Gazette. Effective on Monday, July 14, I’m unplugging the press, shuttering the windows, locking the door and donating my parking spot to anyone who wants it.

I don’t much like quitters, but I love the heck out of people who quit then decide to fight through it and find themselves on top of the world.

You’ll note, I hope, that Eric left a humongous three-day out there in that statement. So won’t you go do your best to get him over this hump?

Jeebus…I feel like Woodrow Call, whipping the crew towards actually getting a herd together and going to Montana. When all I really want to do is be Gus McRae and sit on the porch and drink whiskey and talk to the pretty whores now and then.

1/4 MOON UPDATE: Well, that’s handled. Does Bolivar have breakfast ready? Is Lippy on the piano?

Yahoo! News - Krispy Kreme Franchise Owner Eyes Sale

The largest owner of Krispy Kreme doughnut franchises is exploring a possible sale.

Great Circle Family Foods, based in Los Angeles, owns 22 doughnut shops and holds the exclusive rights to the franchise in Southern California.
Great Circle is seeking $80 million and wants preliminary offers by July 18, with a final decision coming in September, according to the newspaper The Daily Deal, which cited unidentified sources.

This would be called “gettin’ while the gettin’ is good.” It’s a damn donut, and there’s not much standing between me (or far more likely, a real baker) doing the same thing as KK. I wonder what GCFF paid for those franchises, but I’m way too lazy to investigate. If it’s more than 1/10th of the asking price, I’d eat my…cruller or something.

Yahoo! News - CIA Chief Admits Iraq Uranium Claim Error

CIA Director George Tenet gave Congress and the White House the accountability they demanded, declaring Friday that the blame for President Bush’s false allegation about an Iraqi nuclear deal rested squarely with him and his agency

Well, there ya go. Either Georgie’s wife has grown acclimated to the DC lifestyle and will NOT allow him to tell the truth, or it’s the truth. There’s really no other explanation. Not if you’ve got a pair.

This would not be the first time a DC pol failed to display his ownership of said pair, so I’m not ruling out the idea that he’s lying his ass off.

My genius little brother with the Ph.D. had his server get hacked today:

Hey guys,

You may have noticed either the “hacked” disclaimer earlier or the fact that you can’t get to my sites right now.

I hear from my host that the b#stards hosed the server pretty well. They’re going to have to reinstall the OS and restore from backups. No ETA on that, but it could take a while. I’ll be curious to hear how they got in. I don’t think it was either an MT or Nucleus exploit, or necessarily an exploit that was focused on my sites specifically.

Anyway, thought I’d let a few regulars and/or Reductio contributors know what’s up!

I’m pleased the host is good about backups, and that I thought to do full cpanel backups myself on 7-6.

Blar!
Kevin

Yahoo! News - Bush: CIA Cleared Iraq Uranium Claim

President Bush and his national security adviser on Friday put responsibility squarely on the CIA for the president’s erroneous claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to acquire nuclear material from Africa.

“I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services,” Bush told reporters in Uganda.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) was more direct, saying, “The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.”
If CIA Director George Tenet had concerns about the information, “these doubts were not communicated to the president,” Rice said.

While this is not the BEST news possible on the health of the nation, it’s still fascinating. Being a spy-novel reader for as long as I’ve read novels, I have a love/hate relationship with our nation’s intelligence services. I wouldn’t put it past some mid-level middle manager to be leaking unsubstantiated and harmful crap to the enemies of the Bush Machine.

Not sayin’ that’s what’s happening — just pointing out the distinct possibility. Eff me if I’m wrong. Heck, eff me anyway.*

* Like my newly adopted tagline? I don’t, but it kinda catches the whole zeitgeist of bloggerdom for me these days.

Well, well, well. Lookie here. A newspaper, published by Uday Hussein (that’s Saddam’s boy, for those of you not following along), lists a very interesting name as one of the ”Honor Roll of 600”. These are (theoretically) the people closest to the Hussein dictatorship, and the list includes all 55 of the infamous Deck of Cards. The name that’s interesting is one Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod. He’s listed as “intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan”.

Now, this is just one document, and the Tennesseean tells a pretty startling tale, written by one Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of Nashville. Wait a minute…let me rephrase that. It will be startling to a few people. Worse, it will be denied outright as being false and/or implausible and/or meaning nothing at all by legions of Lefties. Richard Bennett calls it a smoking gun. I think we need more to cram down the throats and into the brains of those who will not see, but that’s just me. I love a mountain of evidence, not a single, slender reed. This is somewhere in between. Go read the article and decide for your own self. It’s not the least bit surprising for me.

Found it the Omphalos, who found it at InsterProf, who used to clerk for the lifelong Democrat judge who wrote the article.

STLtoday - news

Sports cars. Round-the-world trips. Finally telling the boss off and walking out for good.

As hopeful lottery players across the country fantasized about what they would do with Wednesday’s $261.3 million Powerball jackpot, William and Claudia Walkenbach were apparently the only ones not dreaming big dreams.

The Hermann, Mo., couple who won half of Wednesday’s Powerball winnings had more prosaic things in mind. Bill Walkenbach said he wanted to “finally get me a tractor with brakes.”

See? That’s the way you do it. Mama’s gonna get a new fridge, too, to replace the 30-year old model.

Some other things on the menu for the Walkenbachs:

“In the summer, we’re going to go north and in the winter, we’re going to go south,” she said.

Bill Walkenbach was thinking bigger, too.

“I may get a new gun, but after we get a new refrigerator,” he said.

See? No need to run off to Gstaad or Rio or any of that crap. Just jump in the car and go see America, babies. I love these folks…got their heads screwed on straight: tractors, guns, fridges, and car trips. My kind of people. Me? I’d probably do a lot of that, too. I’d build me a bowling alley/bar & grill, too, so I’d have something to keep me busy and out of the dope.

Naturally, the local civil servants in Hermann canNOT resist licking their chops:

“I hope it’s someone local - someone that needs it,” said Sheri Hausman, the manager at the town’s library. “Someone who uses the library.”

[sigh]

Pirate fined for assaulting sausage

How did I miss this?

Prosecutors grilled Pirates first baseman Randall Simon, then let him off the hook for hitting one of the Brewers’ sausage mascots with his bat.

Check out the video, of course…here’s the front-page still shot:

That’s just so absurd, I can’t stop grinning. Who says baseball is boring?

Found it at the Baseball Crank, who poses the question, “does targeting the Italian Sausage make it a hate crime?” Hee-hee.

GROAN UPDATE: Rand Simberg: “I have nothing to say about the Great Sausage Incident in Milwaukee, except that it represents baseball at its wurst.” HELP!