Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

(Hat tip: C. Stephen Ludlow.)

It’s been 400 years since the “gunpower plot” was foiled. The BBC has a bunch of links, including a lengthy article asking the question: what if it had succeeded? More on the plot here and here.

Also, Britons are submitting their bonfire photos to Flickr.

Here’s a penny for the Guy!

[Insert NHS inside-joke references to Eustacia Vye, Egdon Heath and the late, great “Murphy tree” here.]

P.S. For those unfamiliar with all of this… Mr. Ludlow, the AP English teacher at Newington High (now retired) and still one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, made Guy Fawkes Day the focal point of a whole bunch of unique, wonderful traditions, and participating in them was like a rite of passage, inducting you into the fraternity of “Lud” alums (Luddites?). Trying to explain everything in this space would take too long and would be futile anyway… it’s a “you had to be there” sort of thing. But I will point out that the entire text of Return of the Native, which is framed by Guy Fawkes Day on each side of the text (well, if you ignore Book Six, which you should), can be read here.

P.P.S. Fellow Lud alums: can you believe it’s been seven years since we were sitting in class, learning about Guy Fawkes and the Murphy tree for the first time?

Heh.

I just realized something. The Irish are 2-6 in games where I’m in attendance. 2-6! Granted, I was rooting against them in two of the six losses… but still! That’s a seriously sucky record! I have so many good memories of last year’s Michigan game, I honestly hadn’t realized how few ND wins I’ve actually seen. Heck, they’ve lost five in a row when I’ve been there! (I didn’t go to the Stanford or BC games last year, or to the BYU game this year, but I did go to the Insight Bowl, so… Purdue, Pitt, Oregon State, Michigan State, USC.) I’m not exactly Brady Quinn’s personal good-luck charm, am I?

It could be worse, though. Becky has been to four ND games, and has yet to see the Irish win once. Hopefully today will be the day.

GOOOOO IRISH!!! BEEEEEAT VOLS!!!

Will they still play “Rocky Top” at The Backer tonight?

They’re rioting in Denmark, too, and have been for several days, according to The American Thinker.

Presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden (D-Delaware) gave a speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday in which, according to the Union Leader, he demonstrated a refreshing willingness to criticize fellow Democrats:

He told the heavily Democratic crowd that Democrats have become elitist. He noted that some Democrats have questioned why he wears an American flag on his lapel.

“We’ve become disconnected from where we grew up,” Biden said. “The Republicans, because of our distance, they have convinced a lot of people we ain’t one of them.”

The type of Democrats who would question why a senator would wear an American flag are the type of Democrats that need to be confronted, not coddled, for the good of the party and of the country. Unfortunately, the trend in the party recently has been to coddle those Democrats, indeed to try and “energize” them, believing that they are the key to electoral success. Hence Michael Moore getting primo seats at the convention; hence Howard Dean becoming party chair.*

Judging by these latest remarks, as well as his 2004 convention speech, Joe Biden may be the man to lead the fight against the fanatics who would drive the Democratic Party into the ground (and cede the political field to the Republicans, including their fanatics). And with more charisma and public-speaking talent than his fellow moderate “Senator Joe,” Lieberman of Connecticut, he may have a better chance of actually catching some “Joe-mentum” than my favorite senator ever did.

Alas, what Biden makes up for in fiery rhetoric and sane policies, he lacks in moral scruples. Whereas Lieberman is a paragon of ethics — the all-too-rare admirable politician — Biden is a sleazy scumbag who, in 2003, pulled a underhanded legislative procedural trick of epic proportions when he managed to sneak the awful RAVE Act into the Amber Alert Bill in an unheralded, eleventh-hour amendment, thus making it politically impossible for his fellow senators to oppose his piece of crappy legislation, which they had wisely voted down a year earlier. Becky has never forgiven him for this and, being Becky, never will. :) Indeed, if she reads this post, I fully expect to see another one of her epithet-laden, not-at-all-family-friendly anti-Biden screeds in comments.

I, on the other hand, take a more nuanced view of the matter. What Biden did with the RAVE Act — about which more here and here — is unforgivable, but alas, not uncommon. If I refused to even consider supporting any politician who had ever engaged in a bit of parliamentary skullduggery, I’d be forced to vote third party in nearly every election. On the other hand, a Democrat with sensible views on foreign policy, a willingness to criticize his own party, and a charismatic speaking ability that could actually win him some hearts and minds (and votes) within the party is all too uncommon these days.

More troublesome, perhaps, than the ethical/parliamentary issue, is the fact that Biden sponsored the RAVE Act in the first place. I’m not particularly sold on the idea of a president with so little respect for constitutional rights that he would work so hard to pass a law that virtually screams to law enforcement officials, “Please abuse me!” But I’m willing to give Biden a fair hearing, and if I can be convinced that the RAVE Act was an aberration in an otherwise sound understanding of the importance of liberty, I could potentially support him (assuming Lieberman isn’t running). After all, the war on terror is certainly the most important issue of our time, and his attitude about that appears (from his DNC speech, at least) to be spot-on.

So, while I will always maintain that Joe Biden is no Joe Lieberman (notwithstanding the title of this post), and while I’m certainly not declaring my support for him now, I will definitely be keeping an eye on the “other” Senator Joe as the 2008 race takes shape.

(Hat tip on the Union Leader article: Best of the Web.)

P.S. One thing is for sure: Becky will never support Biden. I just might, which could mean trouble in the Loy-Zak household — er, actually, by then it will just be the Loy household (Mr. and Mrs. Loy… and perhaps a little baby Loy?) — come 2008. Stay tuned, as they say. :)

*PLEASE NOTE: I am not implying that all anti-war Democrats are “the type of Democrats who would question why a senator would wear an American flag.” But the ones who would question such a thing — believing that the flag is a symbol of war, oppression, Bush and Fox News, and believing it is better to shun it than reclaim it — certainly do belong to the far-left, anti-war crowd (I’m talking anti-Afghanistan-war as well), even though they don’t comprise the whole of it by any means. And they certainly do need to be confronted, and either converted to sanity or told to take a hike. The Democratic Party is suffocating from their venomous fumes.

UPDATE: Here’s a bit more from Biden’s speech:

“We’ve become disconnected from where we grew up. We used to get those middle-class votes,” he said, but he also blamed Republicans because “they’ve convinced the American people, enough of them, that we are out of touch, that we don’t believe in God, that we only care about gays and we don’t have any connection with ordinary folks.” And to cheers, he added, “And I want to tell you I’m sick and tired of it.”

I wish I had a transcript of the whole thing, but I doubt one even exists, as it was just a minor local stump speech.

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, the famously conservative Union-Leader agrees with Biden, and with me:

Further honest comments like those he made Tuesday night might hurt his chances within a party lurching increasingly to the left. But the Democrats need to hear them.

The anti-American left has seriously damaged the party, and unless more high-profile Democrats take them on, theirs will continue to be the minority party in America.

Of course, the term “anti-American left” misleadingly implies that the whole left is unpatriotic — but then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Mainstream Democrats’ tolerance of what unpatriotic, anti-American elements do exist within the party, and their failure to challenge the false, overly-critical-of-America (though not squarely “anti-American”) orthodoxies that dominate the far left, is the very reason why folks like the Union Leader can imply that the whole left is “anti-American.” The solution, as the editorial said, is not to whine about slander from the Right, but to “take on” the villains of the Left who make the slander plausible.

Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire have been seen in the sky all over the world in recent days. Some folks were even spooked by ‘em on Halloween!

It appears that the annual Taurid meteor shower is putting on a better show than usual because Earth is moving through a “swarm” of larger-sized meteoroids this year. The fireballs could continue throughout the next week or two.

Alas, this isn’t like the Leonid meteor storm of 2001, where you can look up at night and be guaranteed to see meteors. These particles are much more spread out, so you could watch for hours and see nothing. But if you do see something, it’ll be spectacular. Some of the fireballs have been reported to be “brighter than a full moon.”

I just accepted my offer from Bryan Cave in Phoenix. So that’s where I’ll be working this summer… and, if all goes well, hopefully beyond. Woohoo! :)

In keeping with my “no blogging about work” policy, you won’t be hearing much about Bryan Cave in this space. But I wanted to at least let y’all know that that’s where I’ll be.

I finally got a check today from Google for my AdSense revenues for the month of September. And as promised, I just donated all money raised between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7 — $113.45 — to the Salvation Army for Hurricane Katrina relief/recovery efforts. (That’s on top of the incredible $15,874 that BrendanLoy.com readers gave directly to one Katrina charity or another during the “Blog for Relief Weekend.”) Thanks, and congrats, guys & gals!

Today is the 10th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a radical Jewish nationalist. I was 14 years old, a freshman in high school, and I remember well what a traumatic event and a total shock it was.

One can’t help but wonder: how different might things be in Israel/Palestine today, if Rabin had lived?

P.S. There are more extremists out there.

“It’s called avian flu, a fatal killer that, when lethal, can be deadly.” –Rob Corddry, “HealthScare” (see video clip here).

The Surreal McCoys, a band made of Notre Dame Law School grads from 1991 through 1993, is having a reunion concert tonight at 8:00 PM at the Sports Page Bar & Grill in Granger. They e-mailed me requesting free publicity. Well, not entirely free; they offered to buy me beers if I posted this on the blog and showed up at the concert. Luckily, this is a blog, which means I don’t need no stinkin’ journalistic integrity! :) So…

My name is Erik Huey. I am a lawyer/lobbyist with the Venable Law Firm in Washington, DC and a 1992 Notre Dame Law School graduate. In the Spring of 1992, during our last semester of ND, we decided to form a zany cow-punk/ Americana/y’alternative band called The Surreal McCoys.

We played to packed bars around South Bend (Club 23, McCormicks, Senior Bar) for three magical months. What we lacked in musical talent, we made up for in stage antics, silly props, and costume changes. (Actually, the rest of the guys in the band are great musicians–I can’t necessarily say the same for my vocals.) It was as much ironic performance art/theatre of the absurd as a rock show–imagine Johnny Cash on acid, but with an arched eyebrow and a healthy sense of self-deprecating humor. I don’t know that we broke any new musical ground, but I have it on good authority that we set single-night beer sales records in every bar we ever played in.

On Friday night, November 4th, the Surreal McCoys getting back together. (See poster…below.)

All of us are now in the throes of our “grown up” life–all practicing attorneys, most married, some with kids, and scattered to the seven winds (South Bend, Minneapolis, Traverse City, Los Angeles, DC). A couple of us have loose connections to the music business. Our bassist’s band in Los Angeles– Aviatic–just signed with Island-Def Jam. I lobby Congress on behalf of the entertainment industry (I represent the Screen Actors Guild, the Recording Artists Coalition, The Creative Coalition, and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists). That said, we’ve all been yearning for the adrenaline rush of those McCoys shows of yesteryear–so we’re all flying in for the show. And this time… we’ve been practicing.

We’re playing at the Sports Page in Granger the night before the Tennessee game. There will be a raucous crowd. There will be drunken revelry. There will be audience sing-alongs to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” and “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Tears will be shed. Hearts will likely be broken, but they will be mended before the last note sounds.

An earlier incarnation of the promotional e-mail invited people to “c’mon up to the Sports Page and rock out with the reunited Surreal McCoys on our ‘Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust: One Stop World Tour.’ It’s bound to be a beer-guzzlin’, spur-whirlin’, tort-feasin’ good time.” LOL!

I doubt I’ll go; offers of free beer notwithstanding, the fact remains that I’m not feeling well. But Brooke is going, and you should too!

In case anyone thought America was the only country that judges politicians on the basis of totally stupid sh*t (e.g., Al Gore lost the 2000 election because he “sighed too much” in a debate; John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in 1960 because he wore a darker suit), consider France, where Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (who is a man) is taking flack for “shrugging his shoulders in a manner seen as dismissive and arrogant.” OH, THE HUMANITY!!!

Brooke notes an interesting sign at the NDLS library.

Finally, the government has a plan to stop bird flu!