Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads that Stiggy has recently lost a dear friend and mentor. He has my deepest condolences.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, for reasons now passing understanding, was much delayed in publishing this piece for the Men’s Club/Divas Thursday. Indeed this topic, “Embarassing Dates” is a toughy for your Maximum Leader. He doesn’t recall that many embarassing dates. Perhaps he’s blocked them out. Perhaps he didn’t date enough to be embarassed. Perhaps all his first date were embarassing and he was just too egotistical to admit it.

Regardless, one date stands out as particularly bad. So he will recount that experience…

A few months after the Minister of Agriculture was lucky enough to wed the lovely Mrs. Smallholder, your Maximum Leader went to visit the happy couple at their domicile in the suburbs of Chicago. At this point, your Maximum Leader was a not-so-swingin’ bachelor. The Smallholder, being a good friend, started working over Mrs. Smallholder to present him with a list of suitable young ladies who might act as a “date” for any nights out we might have during our visit.

It turns out that a college friend of Mrs. Smallholder was in also living in the area and was open to meeting your Maximum Leader. So one night during your Maximum Leader’s visit, “S” joined us for dinner. As it turns out, your Maximum Leader and “S” hit it off and discovered that we had many things in common.

Your Maximum Leader returned to Virginia, but he and “S” kept in touch. Some e-mails. A note or two in the mail. And phone calls. Your Maximum Leader returned to the greater Chicagoland area and tried to pitch a little more woo in “S’s” direction.

After a little while, “S” agreed to come to VA to spend a few days with your Maximum Leader. And that is where the detail of our story begins.

After picking up “S” at Dulles Airport, your Maximum Leader returned her to the great valley of the Shennendoah in Virginia. It was May (as he remembers) and the weather was great. “S” claimed to love the mountains and wanted to go and see some of the sites along Skyline Drive - a scenic route along the ridge of the mountains.

So the day after “S” arrived, your Maximum Leader took “S” up to the mountains. We resolved to go on a little hike and see the Black Water Falls. A particularly nice set of waterfalls with a nice 3 mile hike beginning and ending at a single parking area.

Your Maximum Leader had done the hike before, so he knew the grade wasn’t bad and that it was a good trail on which to walk and talk and pitch a little woo. The trail wasn’t so difficult or technical that one had to pay contant attention to what you were doing.

And therein lay the heart of the problem.

Your Maximum Leader and “S” drove out to the trail’s beginning in your Maximum Leader’s much beloved 1991 Honda Civic DX. The car was red. Got great mileage. And was fun to drive because it handled pretty well and was manual transmission.

We started out on the trail. The trail began by going downhill to the bottom of the falls. That was the really steep grade. Then there was a gentle arching path back up to the top. Your Maximum Leader and “S” did the downhill stretch in no time. We stopped at the bottom, looked at the falls. And chatted about lots of mindless subjects.

At this point your Maximum Leader started to notice that “S” wasn’t quite as warm and open as she’d been in times past. Indeed she seemed a little standoffish and distant.

Your Maximum Leader, while walking and making small-talk, was going over in his mind how he might change tactics. And around that time he noticed a large tree had fallen across the path. There are a number of ways one can traverse a tree which has fallen across your path. Your Maximum Leader, breaking one of the cardinal rules of hiking, decided to take the glamourous way of traversing the fallen tree. With a few steps of a running start, he bounded over the tree. He hoped to impress “S” with this (rather minor) show of agility and prowess.

Alas and unfortunately for him, upon landing on the other side of the tree his first leg to touch down did so in a small hole covered by a flurry of leaves and blocked from view by the bulk of the tree. This leg became caught and twisted violently as the rest of your Maximum Leader’s (considerable) bulk tried to gracefully and athletically finish the follow through.
(more…)

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is pleased to read that the much hyped Acropolis facelift is nearly finished. Remember all that money raised by the Olympics was going to go to restoring and preserving the Acropolis. It should be stunning.

Your Maximum Leader will have to add Athens to the list of placed to visit as soon as possible…

…In case some terrorist bastards decide they want to finish what the Turks left undone.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that there are Explosions reported on London tube, bus -police.

More as this develops.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads with some sadness that James Doohan, of Star Trek fame, has died of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimers. He was 85.

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scot of the Starship Enterprise is an enduring character of TV and film. And James Doohan will be immortal for that role.

Your Maximum Leader learned a few years back that Doohan had stormed the beached of Normandy with Canadian troops on D-day. But until reading this obituary, he had no idea that the Nazis shot off one of his fingers. Wow! Shot 6 times. A wounded war vet. Perhaps we should remember his as much for that as for any character role.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader read the most recent post from the great and mighty Velociman concerning electric can openers.

Like the Velociman, your Maximum Leader can’t stand electric can openers. Now, your Maximum Leader will admit to having spent some ungodly amount approaching $18 for some piece-of-crap ergonomic über-can-opener once. He forgets who made it. But he loved it. It worked with little effort. And that can opener never had to be “fiddled with” or “adjusted” to get it to work… Well, your Maximum Leader never had to fiddle or adjust the can opener. Mrs. Villain hated it. It never worked for her. It would slip. It would fail to pierce the top of the can. It would take about 15 cranks to get it halfway around the can. She hated it. She threw it in the sink. She threw it on the floor. She cursed at it. She cursed your Maximum Leader for insisting that it “worked fine” for him. If your Maximum Leader remembers correctly, she even cut her finger with it once.

To her that $18 can opener was anathema. She wanted it cast into the outer darkness. She damned it on its coming and going. She wanted a great dark chasm in the earth to open and swallow it whole.

Then one day, the $18 can opener disappeared. Gone. Vanished without a race. Your Maximum Leader made no mention of it. And since he had no cans to open, it didn’t seem like a pressing issue. He made a note to pick up a new can opener if the $18 can opener didn’t reappear.

The next day there was a new can opener in the Villainschloss. It was an ugly piece of equipment. Oversized rubber grips. A massive half-moon handle with some plastic coating on it. Very little metal showing. And although it wieghed a lot more than the $18 can opener, it felt cheap. Somewhere on the grip it was emblazoned with the word “Farberware.” Your Maximum Leader saw the reciept for the new can opener in the trash. $5.99.

The Farberware can opener works fine. It rarely slips. It always seems to work effectively. But it doesn’t work with the ease and style that the $18 can opener did. Your Maximum Leader really liked the $18 can opener.

But it is gone. And will likely never return.

And Mrs. Villain has never complained about the new one.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is sending himself a memo. Never get sarcastic with the Crack Young Staff of The Hatemonger’s Quarterly. One wonders if Dr. Cloud has had enough, or if she will come back for more.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just had a good chuckle. It was a chuckle in part because what he read was funny. In part his chuckle was a nervous one based in fear.

The cause was Jeff’s recent post: In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal, 4

Your Maximum Leader will let you figure it out.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader learns from the always informative Mr. Joyner that according to a new NPR poll Public Likes Democrats Less than Republicans.

Wow. And considering all those other polls your Maximum Leader reads (but to which he doesn’t link) Republicans are only slightly edging out Used Car Salesmen, Pedophile Priests, and Carnies in the popularity department. One wonders where that puts the Democrats.

Sorta scary really.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that the President is going to name his nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor in a Prime Time press conference tonight.

This strikes your Maximum Leader as a bad thing. He can’t put his finger on why. But he thinks it is.

On the one hand, it is doubtful that reporters would know enough about every possible nominee to have good questions ready at the press conference. So that might be a little bit of a plus. But it seems that it may not be good timing. Certainly it may deflect some of the Rove attacks, but he’ll still get hammered on that stuff too. And why dothis now? Your Maximum Leader thought he would wait until closer to August and give the Senate less time to dish up the dirt on a nominee.

Well… We’ll see how it goes.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is always amazed to read what things people find in dusty attics. But discoveries by individuals of interesting artifacts in private homes doesn’t really amaze him. Afterall, he’s sure that we all have stuff we never knew about tucked away in boxes here and there. And those boxes can go decades or generations without being opened.

But what really amazes him is when someone finds some interesting artifacts in a collection that had been donated to a college, antiquarian society, museum, or other research institution. One would think that the donation would be catalogued and inventoried at the time it was accepted. Your Maximum Leader knows that colleges, antiquarian societies, museums and research institution are generally not swimming in cash therefore they don’t always catalogue or inventory donated collections.

And because of that you sometimes get a great find. Like the one announced today by the Smithsonian. It seems that a researcher has found “lost” photos taken during the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. The official release from the Smithsonian is a 2.75 MB pdf found here.

What an amazing find. According to the release there is an action shot of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan on the lawn in front of the courthouse arguing some point. (The trial was moved out of the courthouse onto the courthouse lawn due to the crowds.)

And for the first time in his life, your Maximum Leader now knows what John Thomas Scopes looks like. He’s read all about the trial, but never seen a photo of Scopes.

It is pretty incredible stuff.

If you Maximum Leader weren’t being Maximum Leaderly, he wouldn’t mind just volunteering to go through and inventory and catalogue various collections at the Smithsonian. He wouldn’t be an efficent worker, but he’d have lots of fun.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that there is a mini-kerfluffle concering members of the Northwestern University Ladies LaCrosse Team wearing flip-flops to their White House meeting with President Bush.

First off, your Maximum Leader is glad that college-chicka footwear is a big enough story to deflect ome attention away from Karl Rove. But frankly, to maximize the cover that this story could bring to the White House your Maximum Leader suggests that some other Senior White House Staffer start dating one of the women atheletes in question. Perhaps it should be Scott McClellan. Or perhaps they could bring Ari Fleischer back just for this mini-scandal.

Secondly, the flip-flops in question, while probably not what your Maximum Leader would allow one of the Villainettes to wear to the White House don’t appear to be that eggregious. But your Maximum Leader will defer to others who know these things better. Like the very lovely Annika, or perhaps Minion Molly.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on the wire that General William C. Westmoreland has died.

General Westmoreland was for a time commander of US forces in Vietnam. Your Maximum Leader is conflicted, as are so many Americans, about Westmoreland. Personally, your Maximum Leader feels that Westmoreland did the best he could with the resources at his disposal and under the conditions for action set for him by LBJ and Robert McNamara (et al).

Westmoreland was, to say the least, a contraversial figure. May he now rest in peace.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader continues to be amazed at how hard the whole Rove story is being played by both sides. The Dems will not rest until Rove is hanged. And now the President has officially lowered the ethics bar to the “you had to do something illegal” level to be fired.

Of course, this issue would be a non-issue (almost) if Rove were to step aside on his own.

Perhaps there is another aspect of this. While the Rove story burns bright, other stories are on the back burner. Like potential supreme court justices, social security, the war. All that stuff. Is is possible (though improbable) that the Administration is working behind the scenes while the l’affaire Rove keeps attention focued elsewhere?

Anyway… For more thoughtful consideration and punditry on the Rove situation, so and read Skippy’s latest. It seems your Maximum Leader isn’t the only one who makes Skippy feel sexy any more…

There is only one item which your Maximum Leader would like to interject into Skippy’s point. It appears that there is a list kept by the CIA called the “NOC” list. It was mentioned by Eleanor Cliff and someone else (Mort Kondrake?) on some of the Sunday talk shows. To hear it spoken about, this “NOC” list is a master list of undercover CIA agents protected under the 1982 Intellegence Agents Protection Act that is at the heart of the legal case against Rove. To hear these pundits talk about it, Valerie Plame was not on the “NOC” list. Where this is made unclear is that the CIA referred this leak on the Justice because there is some internal CIA discussion about how certain subject matter experts (SME) may need to be covered under the law without being on the “NOC” list. Your Maximum Leader will try and find some transcripts and update this post accordingly.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has, from time to time, been known to play computer games to let his escape from the daily strains of being Maximum Leaderly. He recently bought “Rome: Total War.” Well, he bought it about a week ago, but just loaded it Saturday night and started playing.

Now your Maximum Leader is a great fan of all the Total War games. He bought Shogun: Total War and then moved on to Medieval: Total War. Until yesterday night, he would have told you that Shogun was the best game. He would have said that for many reasons. It was so ground breaking and innovative. You get macro-level strategery for your faction and you get unit command on the micro-level when you battle other factions. The animations were excellent. And those cool movies everytime you attacked something with a ninja were cool.

Medieval brought many new features and complexities. But it also added time. It was a longer game to play. It really wasn’t so much a reinvention of Shogun as much as an improvement in some areas that didn’t always need to be improved. Still an excellent game, but its added complexity diminished it somewhat when compared to Shogun.

And then there was Rome. Now the campaign mode of the game looks to be even longer than Medieval. So that might not be a plus. But there are better animations and more angles at which to view both the strategic map and the battle map. Rome has made considerable improvements in how reinforcements are made during battle. Also, the way terrain is chosen on which one fights battles is vastly improved.

Though your Maximum Leader can go on and on about how much of an improvement Rome is over the other games, all the improvements pale in comparison to ONE.

The object of the game (in Rome: Total War) is to lead one of the three great Roman families to become Emperor and conqueror of most of the world. You can choose the Julii, the Brutii, or the Scipii. Each family has members (depicted on a neat family tree) who are your generals, governors, and so on. Your family can also recruit diplomats, spies, and assassins. All these “characters” (ie: family members, diplomats, spies, and assassins) can have retinues. These retinues are sub-characters who add to or detract from certain abilities of the main characters they follow. For example, in your Maximum Leader’s game many of his diplomats have translators in their retinues. Having a translator in a diplomat’s retinue makes it more likely that the diplomat can complete a mission. Some of his family members have siege engineers, poets, priests, exotic slaves, philosophers, and playwrights in their retinues. But there is one retinue that just made your Maximum Leader laugh and laugh and laugh. It was the ONE improvement to which he just alluded.

In the game your Maximum Leader recruited/trained an assassin. This assassin was sent on a number of successful missions. He killed two Gallic diplomats and then a Gallic general. After killing the Gallic general a message indicator appeared on the screen. It seemed that the assassin had acquired a retinue. This was strange as your Maximum Leader couldn’t imagine what sort of a retinue an assassin would have. So your Maximum Leader read the message. The assassin had a cataite in his retinue.

A catamite.

Heh.

There are probably two readers of this blog who will find this as funny as does your Maximum Leader.

For the rest of you loyal readers… Sorry. Inside joke.

Carry on.