If anybody is wondering where I am, the answer is I’m alive, upping my cholesterol level with my first In n Out double burger ever. I screwed up the order though and meant to ask for my fries to be animal style and got the burger animal style instead. So, I fail at the secret menu. And I think that’s as basic as using the secret menu as you can get. Frackin’ Noob.

I made it out of Boston ahead of the weather (it wasn’t forecast to hit us anyway but once one city gets hit with a blizzard, air travel gets spotty) and spent 9 hours in O’Hare where I learned that an iPhone needs to be charged at least at least once every hour of internet use.

I don’t intend on updating the blog until I get back next weekend but I will be tweeting sporadically so if you want to contact me, that’s the best way to do it. (Over on the right.. near the contact info. There ya go)

See you next week.

Haiti’s leader says it’s clear to him that the 10 US Baptists who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the quake-ravaged country “knew what they were doing was wrong”.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said some of the children have parents who are alive. The government is attempting to locate them. He says a judicial system needs to determine whether the Americans were acting in good faith – as they claim – or are child traffickers.

The Baptists are mostly from Idaho. They have been held since being arrested on Friday trying to enter the Dominican Republic with the children.

Haitian officials yesterday said they are considering sending the group back to the US for prosecution. Haiti’s court system was crippled by the earthquake on 12 January, which destroyed the Justice Ministry building in the capital, Port- au-Prince, and killed many government workers.

Here’s my favorite part:

Since their arrest on Friday near the Dominican border, the Americans have been held inside dingy concrete rooms in the same judicial police headquarters where ministers give disaster response briefings. They have not yet been charged. A lawyer representing them alleged yesterday that they were being treated poorly and that one of them, a diabetic, fainted and was taken to hospital. Attorney Jorge Puello, in the Dominican Republic, said they were not being given adequate medical care and food.

Not being given adequate medical care or food? Why not? It’s not like there was a major natural disaster in an already poor country or anything. Can’t missionaries kidnap non-orphans anymore without all this red tape?

Still not getting old for me.

(via DoobyBrain)

“Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.

“We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough.”

From the maker of the Phantom Menace review.

Here’s part 2:

Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank’s diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

“The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition,” which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank’s death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.

Letters of Note has a letter written by Mark Twain to a patent medicine salesman:

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.