Immigration police chief in Thailand says the man held in connection with the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey has confessed to the crime. Visit CNN for the latest.

Here’s another way to bide your time until September 2.

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At a gas station/convenience store/Subway restaurant in Elk City, OK. From the merchandise, this appears to be more Cowboy country than Sooner country.

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 
The first half of Spike Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina debuted tonight in New Orleans. It airs on HBO next Monday and Tuesday.

Lee interviewed me for over an hour, but I have no idea if I’m in the film or not. As I wrote previously, “to be honest, if I were going to tell the story that he’s trying to tell in four hours, I don’t know that I’d include me.” That said, if I am in the film, I suspect that I’d be in either “Act I” or “Act II” — i.e. the two parts that debuted tonight — judging from the summary in this article:

Act I covers the storm’s arrival; Act II chronicles the failure of the emergency response; Act III follows an abandoned community coming to grips with all that it lost, and Act IV addresses the halting, haphazard effort to begin again.

If anybody is perchance stopping by this blog after watching the film at the New Orleans Arena tonight, please comment and let us know a) what you thought of it, and b) whether I’m in it! Not necessarily in that order of importance, I might add. :)

Did I really just say “Boomer Sooner”? Please, someone, kill me now. :) Anyway, we're in Oklahoma.

Bill at INDJJournal links to my quitting-the-Democratic-Pary post, quotes it (”I am no longer a Democrat”), and then writes:

Do you feel it, Brendan? Do you feel the power of the dark side? Let the hate course through your veins!

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-h-*cough*cough*cough* … *cough*

LOL!

Ace also links to my post, and throws out not Star Wars references but — even better — Lord of the Rings references, as he describes his own conversion to the “dark side,” years earlier:

I didn’t have as big as a defining event as Loy did. After thinking of myself as a Democrat (and liberal) all through high school, and actually subscribing to The Nation freshman year of college to “get informed” with “the real facts” (don’t worry– I stiffed them on the bill), and after being a big booster of “flaming centrist” Al Gore in 1988, I began drifting pretty fast.

Mostly by watching liberals and conservatives argue.

One side seemed to make sense, even if I knew in my heart they were racist and backwards and just plain ol’ wrong.

The other side seemed to screech and make things up on the fly and mostly spew out a lot of senseless twaddle. They seemed to have little comprehension of how these strange creatures called “human beings” actually thought, worked, and lived. They always seemed to be talking about some other, more angelic form of life, like High Elves or something. (Alternately, they were always talking about some far more demonic form of life, like, I don’t know, Balrogs, or Fiendish Dire Gelatinous Cubes.)

Heh. Read the whole thing.

I’ll have more to say about this, incidentally, if I ever get around to it — including an excellent response e-mail that I received from a Democratic reader (the one and only Dem whose response to my post was not calling me names and saying “good riddance,” but instead, trying to dissuade me — imagine that!)

We’re through Amarillo, and past most of the rough weather (though more may be ahead as we near the Oklahoma border).

Oklahoma City, our overnight stopping point back in May, is about 240 miles away. Becky, however, is making noises about driving through the night — something which she also proposed back in May, but which I vehemently rejected then because I was so freakin’ exhausted, post-exams, that I couldn’t possibly have done a shift driving, and Becky driving all night long while I sleep is obviously not terribly safe. Anyway, now she’s proposing the same thing (who knew Becky was so anxious to get back to South Bend?), and when I object, she asks, “Where’s your sense of adventure?” I’m not sure if I have the energy to fight this particular fight… so we may be driving through the night. :) Obviously, we’ll stop if we get too tired to continue — I’ll insist on that, at least.

I just managed to grab a screenshot of a Texas DOT traffic cam just as Becky and I were driving through the camera’s field of view! We’re the silver car behind the black-and-white truck.

Sweet!

Stuck in traffic in a thunderstorm in Amarillo.

Clearly, this sign was not designed by Natalie Maines:

:)

In other news, there are storms ahead.

Having heard Tammy Bruce, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly earlier, we just caught a brief Michael Savage segment, in which we learned that Mike Wallace and Dan Rather “are going to get us all killed.” Heh.

We just entered Texas. The only FM radio we can get is in Spanish. SOMEBODY CALL LOU DOBBS!!! :) On the AM side, though, we just found Bill O'Reilly, so all is well. ;) And now somebody just called
the Lebanese army the "lesbian army" by mistake. LOL!

We just stopped for gas, food, and to walk and feed the animals in Moriarty, New Mexico. Back on the I-40 now… and marveling at the reappearance of the name JonBenet Ramsey in the news (!).
Seriously… Thailand?!?