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OK, so at the end of a truly awful weekend, I just wrote today's entry and had it disappear into the ether at the hands of a malfunctioning mouse that double-clicks every time I click. To say I nearly propelled it through the wallboard would be an understatement.

The crux of the post was that I have wrapped my brain around the field of presidential nominees a million times and I still can't think of any logical argument regarding who will win the Republican nomination. I'm really just at a loss for words. I had previously developed a logically consistent argument that Fred Thompson would be the front-runner when he declared, but his campaign appears DOA. The neck-breaking yawn with which his announcement was greeted must have been stunning even to his biggest naysayers.

So please, use the comments to make an argument; who in the hell is going to win that thing? I'm out of defensible theories and I'm completely open to suggestion. Don't just tell me who – explain why any of these people could reasonably be considered a favorite over any of the others.

I'll stop making you do all the work on this blog soon, I promise.

Hi all. I'm sneaking back on here (shh!) to pimp my new blog No Arts No Letters. Ginandtacos is officially like Three's Company – it has a spinoff site, and this page will be every bit as good as The Roepers. Right now classes are a bitch, so I'll be posting in direct positive proportion to how much work I have to do at any given moment, and how much I want to procrastinate.

I also have to announce that I am declaring myself a winner in an age-old contest Ed and I have been waging. For a long time we've been trying to outdo each other with ideas for absurd wills. It's one of the oldest cliches in books/movies/tv – The Suprise Will! A will that involves a night in a haunted house, leaving a funeral home to a wayward son, taking control of the team if you win the Denslow Cup, etc. etc.

Ed has usually won this contest, thinking of far more absurd and ridiculous requirements to be announced at the reading. But now I have him beat. (Warning: it gets geeky here).

Someone recently told me that there is this company that will take your cremated remains and turn them into jewelry. Yes, you read that correctly. You can get a necklace, a keepsake or a gem created out of the ashes of a loved one who has passed away.

At the reading of my will it will be announced that my remains have been turn into a ring (if this can't be done, a gem on a ring), and that this ring must be carried to an active volcano and destroyed by being thrown into said volcano. A certain Andy S. from Chicago, an old roommate and even bigger LOTR fan than myself, has already agreed to carry the ring around his neck. If we get really old before I pass away (potentially not likely), his nephew will be allowed to carry the burden.

The rest of my life may now become dedicated to making enough money to make this as absurd as possible. I'll have to hire people who will travel with him. I'll also need to pay one member to go nuts and, after failing to convince Andy to take the ring to Iraq (or whatever battleground is the latest in the War on Terror), try to steal The Mike Ring. This will cause Andy to disband the fellowship. I'll need to find some sort of junkie to stalk Andy as he walks to the volcano. And I'll also need to purchase a large spider, and pay handlers in advance to put it near the base of the volcano.

This may or may not surprise you, but I am about excited as humanly possible to get going on this plan. Ed, can you beat this Last Will and Testament?

Allright, hope to see some of you over at the new place, or perhaps on a rss feeder.

It's time for another audience participation No Politics Friday ™.

My last band practice featured a heated* debate regarding the infamous Britney Spears performance at an MTV award show this week. Video of it can be found here (although Viacom is deleting YouTube videos approximately as fast as users can add them, so the link may not last. Just search 2007 VMA.) I strenuously argued, prior to having seen it, that it could not possibly top the 2002 Guns 'n Roses MTV performance in which a fat, cornrowed Axl Rose subjected the world to 5 screeching, off-pitch minutes of his art.

After seeing the Spears video, I see no reason to back down. Watching her lip-sync and look like crap is really nothing new. Note to American men: if you have any Britney-based masturbation fantasies you want to indulge, I'd do it soon if I were you. In another few years her ass is going to resemble the rear of an AMC Gremlin in both size and shape. Axl wins. Or loses. Actually, we all lose just for having watched this.

Anyway, now it's your turn to nominate – with linked videos, please – the most appalling, embarassing live performance by an artist who is at least moderately well-known. I don't watch a lot of TV and I don't pay attention to things like MTV video awards, so there is probably a lot that I am missing. Correct me.

*It wasn't heated at all, but it's inherently pleasing to describe an argument as "heated" in prose.

While I'm on the subject of awful people, I have both sets of fingers crossed that Steve Fossett is found a few months from now as a bleached skeleton minus a generous number of cougar bites. I'd never kill anyone, but I do read some obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

His latest misadventure is one of the more pedestrian; the private plane he was piloting went down somewhere in the sparse Nevada countryside. There's currently a massive rescue party – 50,000 people – searching for him or his remains. But this man is no stranger to large rescue parties.

Fossett, a multimillionaire commodities trader in his 60s, has busied himself for the past decade by trying to fly hot air balloons around the world solo. He succeeded in 2002, but only after five previous attempts ended in failure. Ordinarily that sort of thing wouldn't bother me. In fact, I think pointless adventuring is pretty cool. But on each of those instances, he went down in a ridiculously remote area of the Pacific and needed to be rescued by the Coast Guard or similar rescue agencies from other nations. You'd be stunned at how much it costs to send the Coast Guard to pluck a stranded balloonist out of the uninhabited void of the oceans. And guess who foots the bill?

Let's put it this way: the current search – in Nevada – has cost over $100,000. Plucking him out of the ocean has run well into the $1 million or more range on multiple occasions. Essentially, Steve Fossett, who has more money than Jesus, has his personal hobbies subsidized by the government. No matter how poorly planned or ill-conceived his schemes may be, he goes off half-cocked on his self-financed adventures and waits for the Coast Guard to rescue him. Not like they have anything better to do with their time or budget.

Fossett is not the only person guilty of such stupidity – the cost of rescuing idiots is starting to cast a pall over normal, intelligent people's enjoyment of the outdoors. For example, because group after group of idiots get stranded on mountains like Hood or Rainier (at the cost of $10,000 or more per rescue) more parks and mountains are starting to require significant deposits or climbing fees. That means that those of us who aren't mentally retarded – you know, the kind who have proper equipment and don't climb into snowstorms – end up paying the price. Not to mention, of course, the strain placed on the budgets of our woefully underfunded outdoor areas.

People make mistakes. Accidents happen. Wilderness rescues are going to be needed. However, a climber breaking his leg on Mount Rainier is a lot different than an exceptionally rich moron making a mistake five times and handing us the bill. Hopefully the state of Nevada will put in a claim on Fossett's estate for the cost of his latest misadventure.

With all due respect to Keith Olbermann's daily "Worst Person in the World" feature (and by the way, Keith is taking that "#1 Rated Talk Show on Cable" title Bill O'Reilly loves to wave around) I think that we need to honor the anniversary of 9/11 by talking about how George Tenet is the worst person currently alive.

I have been of the opinion for quite some time that the 9-11 commission report should be required reading for every adult in this country. Those of you who are regulars to G&T are probably not sure why I would so strongly recommend the work of such a slipshod, biased collection of political tap water. When Lee Hamilton is your big-time liberal on the committee, there are some problems with diversity of viewpoint. Let's leave it at that.

No, the report is a must-read because of the incredible depth of research in the first ten chapters. The "recommendations" and pontificating that make up the last three chapters are beyond useless, and it is a waste of your time to read them. Period. But the intricate trail of hundreds of small, related decisions throughout the 90s and the early W years is incredible. It's both enlightening and infuriating to read it closely and understand just how close the law enforcement and intelligence communities came to averting this disaster. It's a litany of red flags ignored, inter-agency pissing contests, and bureaucratic nonsense which culminates in 3000 dead bodies. The depth of the biographies of the perpetrators and descriptions of their movements in the years prior to the attack are almost eerie.

It's very hard to read the report and not come away wanting to punch Tenet in the cock. Chapter 4 describes, in painstaking detail, an equivocating pansy at the head of the CIA who talked Bill Clinton out of terrific opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden – repeatedly. No matter how many aerial photos or how much human intelligence they had, Tenet was just never "100% certain" that bin Laden was where we thought he was. Now, I'm not exactly a let's-project-American-military-might conservative who advocates solving diplomatic problems with cruise missiles. But bin Laden had already been identified as a major threat who was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks against Americans and others. It was clear to everyone, including Bill Clinton and pre-9/11 George W. Bush, that bin Laden was a serious threat who needed to be eliminated. Had Tenet said the word (without being wishy-washy or couching his words in cautionary disclaimers) he would have been killed.

Fast forward to 2003, and Tenet is called upon by another president to offer his assessment of a specific threat. Suddenly the enormous pussy version of Tenet who served Clinton was gone. The new, I-attended-a-Tony-Robbins-seminar version of Tenet was just 100% dead sure about everything. Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction? SLAM DUNK! Oh man, the intelligence on that simply could not have been any more solid! If Tenet was ever certain of anything, it was this! Hell, the bin Laden intelligence (aerial photos showing bin Laden walking into his sleeping quarters in a terrorist training camp) was paper-thin. But for WMDs in Iraq, we had the best, most solid kind of human intelligence that can be found in this lifetime: third-hand reports from Eastern European intelligence agencies and Ahmed Chalabi's word. You can see why he was so much more confident with Iraq.

Worst of all, Tenet recently released a pathetic, self-serving book in an effort to paint himself as some sort of hero throughout all of this. I was only able to get through about 15 pages before the urge to projectile vomit was too strong. It is probably the most nakedly cynical effort to revise one person's role in history since Robert McNamara's "I was such a big opponent of Vietnam" performance in Fog of War.

So thanks and go fuck yourself, George Tenet, for your years of service to your country! There is nothing wrong with you as a person that pancreatic cancer or a horrible one-car accident couldn't fix.

Shockingly, Saint Petraeus sat before Congress on Monday and talked about how much the situation in Baghdad is improving. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming. I thought for sure he was going to tell Congress "God, it's totally fucked up over there, and it gets worse every day." His glowing assessment of the situation is as candid as it is surprising.

He repeated a claim he made last week to the Australian media, namely that "sectarian violence" has fallen by something like 75% since last year. Considering that every other source on the planet reports no change – or perhaps even a slight increase – in civilian deaths, how on Earth did the military come up with a bunch of graphs and statistics showing the exact opposite? It's pretty easy, really. I think this Washington Post piece sums it up nicely. I draw your attention to the following quotes:

Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra(…)those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen — recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda — are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

Given that we already know that U.S. military statistics do not count car bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices in their civilian death counts, what Saint Petraeus really said today is simple:

"Well, Congressmen, civilian casualties are plummeting, as long as you don't consider Shiites who kill other Shiites, Sunnis who kill other Sunnis, civilians killed by U.S.-armed violent militias, people killed by car bombs, or people shot in the front of the head as civilian casualties."

And clearly, what reasonable person would consider any of those things to be indicators of violence? I mean, hey, our leaders in Washington are realists! When they say Baghdad needs security, they don't mean there won't be a few truck bombs or death squads here and there. Nothing's perfect, right?

The New York Sun richly deserves its reputation as a 9th-rate fish wrapper of a newspaper. It not only makes the Washington Times and Sean Hannity seem fair and balanced but it doesn't even seem to be in touch with reality among hardcore conservatives. They got (and richly earned, I might add) considerable scorn and mockery when they begged Dick Cheney to throw his hat into the presidential race in 2008. I mean, could they even find 20 Republicans who would think that's a good idea? Cheney doesn't even think it's a good idea.

But they're back at it again. Now it's President Petraeus they seek. This editorial, as ridiculous as it is, illustrates two trends very well.

1. The Petraeus worship is really reaching a crescendo just before his "eagerly-awaited" testimony before Congress (likely to be held on 9/11…excuse me, I may have just aspirated my own vomit). What role can't Saint David fill! Pope? Supreme Court justice? Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe? He's literally the greatest and most honest person who ever lived…so when he says the Surge of Bullshit is working, why, we'd better believe him! Never mind that he's already admitted that it hasn't changed a goddamn thing. I wonder if he'll repeat that quote before Congress this week.

2. Is the GOP presidential field pathetic or what? It speaks very, very poorly of the candidates' ability to excite even the conservative base (let alone the rest of the country) that the right-wing talk-o-sphere is still throwing out additional candidates. They've got eleven people who have either formally declared or put out feelers (Gingrich) and they're still looking for someone to ride in on a white horse and save them. And. AND. This is less than a week after Knight in Shining Armor #1 – Fred Thompson – declared. Boy, they got sick of him in a hurry. When one has the choice of 11 candidates and still can't find one good enough to preclude wistful thoughts of new candidates joining the fray, it's safe to say that trouble's a-brewin'.

I like bad movies. They fascinate me. But I like unbelievably bad movies, movies that actually hurt to sit through. Some movies are passively bad (X-Men 3, Maid in Manhattan, Ghost Rider, etc). They're just boring, dumb, poorly acted, and so on. I like movies that are aggressively bad. They're so bad it's actually shocking, and they inspire reactions like "My God, what were they thinking?" In an effort to lighten things up around here, I'm going to share some of my favorites with you – films that blast through the "awful" barrier with such force that they come full circle back to "entertaining."

So. Battlefield:Earth. I firmly believe that every man, woman, and child on the planet should watch this film. It simply needs to be seen to be believed. And if I can get everyone to watch it, it will greatly reduce the chance that such a mistake could happen again. It took me three tries to make it through this film. Honest to God. It is physically difficult to watch.

Battlefield:Earth is based on an L. Ron Hubbard novel. As if that wasn't enough to doom it to the "shit" pile, it stars (and was bankrolled by) Hubbard spawn John Travolta. A friend once asked me what made this film so exceptionally bad – what was wrong with it? The short answer is everything. Everything is wrong with it.

Start with a movie about 9-foot tall aliens called 'Psychlos' and their plucky, enslaved human charges. Add the worst special effects this side of Stargate SG-1 and high school play-quality costumes. Spice liberally with ridiculous, nonsensical plot and a script that sounds like it was written in Urdu and translated into English with a free online translator. Have all the characters act and make decisions like they are recovering from a series of massive strokes. Top it off with jerking, headache-inducing cinematography. Watch until nauseous.

Barry Pepper (who, along with Forest Whitaker, I simply pity throughout this trainwreck) stars as the ringleader of the humans. He is the optimistic one who will show his downtrodden bretheren how to rise up and defeat their Psychlo captors. By the end of the film, he succeeds. I have kept the plot summary brief simply because most of what goes on within that framework is so idiotic that it actually makes one forget what the movie is about.

I will share only one scene, one that captures everything that is stunning and inimitable about this film. Psychlo leader Terl (Travolta) is trying to educate the pluckiest human Johnny Goodboy Tyler (Pepper) in the Psychlo language to make him an effective manservant. He decides that the best way to motivate the dirty, starved human is to tempt it with the promise of delicious food. Unfortunately, Psychlos do not know what humans like to eat. So he decides that the best way to figure it out….is to let all the humans escape and use a hidden camera (secreted in the button of Pepper's shirt) to see what they eat. As my movie-watching companion exclaimed, "That's the worst plan I've ever heard." Anyway, the escaped, starving humans end up eating rats in desperation – leading the Psychlos to think that humans like rats! Hilarity ensues! The icing on the cake is when Pepper discovers, and destroys, the hidden camera. Forest Whitaker leaps to his feet and exclaims "MY GOD, THEY FIGURED OUT THE BUTTON CAM!"

Yep. I find it hard to believe that this film could have been made by members of the same species as me. It just boggles the mind. I'd like to say that was the worst part of the film, but about 20 minutes later some illiterate, loincloth-clad cave men were flying Harrier jets. In the context of everything wrong with this movie, such unbelievable nonsense barely even registered at the time.

See this movie. It is, in the literal sense of the term, amazing. I promise you will be amazed by it.

A (very) loose acquaintance chided me for being an alarmist yesterday. I expressed outrage over the revelation that a B-52 laden with nuclear weapons (which the Air Force admits it lost) flew its cargo a few thousand miles over the American mainland. The individual lectured me on the exceptionally slight odds of any harm resulting from such an act.

Ten years ago, I probably would have punched him. Instead I punched him with facts.

Believe it or not, accidents and near-misses involving nuclear weapons are not just the stuff of bad John Travolta movies. Why, one might even get a little nervous upon realizing just how many American nuclear weapons are lying around and waiting to be discovered by eager treasure hunters. There's one immediately off the coast of Savannah, GA. Another sits in a roped-off and completely unguarded patch of land near Goldsboro, NC. And in the Puget Sound just outside Seattle since 1959. If you're overseas, there's one very near the Japanese Ryukyu Islands. Palomares, Spain is still crackling with radioactivity thanks to four lost hydrogen bombs nearly 50 years ago (two of which helpfully exploded and showered the area in plutonium). And there are a couple more somewhere in the Mediterranean – we don't even really know where! – from a bomber that disappeared without a trace in 1956. Come to think of it, the list of nuclear weapons lost, unaccounted for, or involved in accidents over land is about as long as my arm. I could go on and on, but you can read. From Thule, Greenland to Hardinsburg, KY, the tangible legacy of incompetence is everywhere.

Just think. That long, long list covers only the incidents they've actually revealed to the public (it mysteriously peters out in the late 1960s). So in reality there are probably many more. Given that we can safely assume that the Soviets had at least as many "mishaps," the enterprising terrorist wouldn't have to spend much time online to scout some nice treasure-hunting locales. Oh, and don't forget France and the UK, both of which tote large nuclear arsenals about in accident-prone submarines. But why bother searching for bombs in the ocean when the Soviets left Siberia littered with unguarded, nuclear-powered lighthouses in which they've long since lost interest in maintaining? If terrorists discover the science of winter coats, there's fissile material a'plenty up north! Fortunately there are no Muslim terrorists in Russia today. I think.

So if you're wondering how in the hell the military "lost" 6 hydrogen bombs, rest assured it happens all the time. Given that they actually found these, in the comparative light of history this week's incident looks like a stunning display of competence.