Sentential Links #171

Time for the weekly linkage:

:: Not to diminish Mancow’s experience, but if he thought that was torture, think what the real deal must be like. You are snatched out of nowhere, flown across the world, kept awake for days on end in a freezing room with little food, woken every time you fall asleep on your metal bed, thrown against the wall with that lovely procedure known as collaring, slapped, had dogs threatening you, yelled at and beaten, and so on and so forth. That goes on for a couple weeks to soften you up, then you are dragged by multiple burly men and waterboarded repeatedly. You have no dead man’s switch like Hitchens did, you have no “safe” word to stop the process, there are no cameras and friends there to make sure you are alright. These people have been abusing you non-stop for days or weeks, for all you know this is when they finally kill you.

Of course it is torture. I’m sick and tired of having this stupid damned debate. (Amen to that. A while back, when Sean Hannity brayed that he'd undergo waterboarding and "he'd do it for the troops", I thought, "OK, you blowhard. But let's do it right. Let's have someone grab you off the street, throw you into a van, blindfold you, and drive you to someplace you have no idea. Then let's have them strip off your clothes, deprive you of food for days, not say a word to you except to tell you to stand up or lie down; let's have them randomly beat you. And then let's have them waterboard you. No cameras to record your bravado. No knowledge that after ten seconds it'll all be over. Let's have them waterboard you, over and over and over again, until you scream for no more. And then, well, lather, rinse, repeat. Days, weeks, months, until you finally confess whatever it is we want you to confess. And then...we'll do it again. For fun, this time. And if you get out alive, at least you'll have the knowledge that you did it "for the troops".

Anyone whose moral compass includes waterboarding is not someone I want around me, for anything at all.)

:: Oh, God, imagine there’s bacon on one side of my mouth and sausage on the other and they meet and have hot and angry make-up sex in the middle while a salt lick cheers them on.

:: Just for fun I decided to read something popular for a change; a bestseller throughout the English speaking world and across Europe. My first thought was The Recess by Sophia Lee.

:: One of the interesting outcomes of having married a man 12 yrs older than myself is that along with my husband came four step kids, two of which were closer to me in age than my spouse.

:: I often look at footage of the wildfires that sweep through the western states and think, "If only we had giant fire fighting robots." (I have never thought this in my life. But I'm going to start.)

:: If we can have an entire "Antiques Roadshow" in which we slobber over household objects from the 1890s and declare them Invaluable Reminders of Our Venerated Past, why stop with Tiffany lamps? Why the hell not preserve a dirt road that we can say with complete confidence is in exactly the same configuration as when Elijah White led his 35th Virginia Comanches to attack a contingent of Federal cavalry on the night of January 17, 1865? What would such a road be, if not an antique?

:: Hell hath no fury like a middle schooler with a Twitter account!

All for this week.