Showing, once again, that individuals are the great thinkers and inventors and NOT any government, a Michigan man has come up with something that will make many a man (and, perhaps, woman) smack himself (or, possibly, herself) upside the head and say “Why the HELL didn’t I think of that?!”

BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) - Harry Haney has built a sled that can walk on water.

The 39-year-old’s snow boat is a 14-foot custom-made aluminum craft welded into a standard snowmobile. The prototype has been named one of Time magazine’s most amazing inventions of 2004.

Well, even with the *spit* Time *spit* recognition, it’s still a pretty kick-ass invention.

Haney, who grew up on Saginaw Bay where his dad taught him to fish, had a friend and fellow fishermen die after falling through the ice a few years back. He got a patent for his amphibious vehicle in July 2003.

“There’s always danger out there, the way the wind and the weather is,” Haney said. “But this machine will go anywhere. It’s very stable in water.”

Where there’s a need, there’s an individual, somewhere, who will come up with a way of fulfilling said need.

Haney drew up his idea on a paper plate while visiting the Upper Peninsula with relatives. A friend of one of his cousins agreed to do the welding.

The nearly six-foot wide boat took a month to produce. Haney took it to the annual Houghton Lake Tip-Up Town USA last year where it was the envy of other sledders, he said.

And did he run to the government asking for a handout to subsidize his invention, ala Airbus or any of the other Socialist Succubi?? Nope.

Haney has contacted both snowmobile and boat companies and is hoping one or both will buy into his idea as a search and rescue or ice fishing vehicle.

Like any other good capitalist, he’s looking to reap the rewards of his idea and the fruits thereof. Of course, the Socialist Shitsniffers (aka Lickers of Lenin’s Loins?) will whine about how he should forego all profit and just donate his invention For The Children?.

“If somebody goes down and there’s enough of these around, they can call and get them out right away,” he said. “I’m looking for an investor to take it on.”

And we hope you find many, many investors, Mr. Haney. We’ll raise a mug of Imperial Draught? in your honor when the first life is saved and you’re kicking back in the lap of luxury because of your ingenuity.

F.E.T.E.

Today’s lesson has to do with the importance of proper punctuation and the potential for misunderstandings that may occur with the lack thereof.

Example #1: “It’s tough to leave your girlfriends behind.“

Simple and straightforward enough, no?

Example #2: “It’s tough to leave your girlfriend’s behind.“

‘Nuff sed.

Remember kids: “Punctuation is the key to conveying meaning.”— B.C.

That concludes today’s lesson. You may now discuss amongst yourselves.

F.E.T.E.

With New Year’s Eve fast upon us let your heart be warmed by this story, already noted by Tim Blair.

Group holds fast to Kerry cause with Beacon Hill vigil

The election is long over. A new year is starting, and even most of the more ardent liberals are moving on. But in Louisburg Square this week, one determined group isn’t quite ready to let go. About a half dozen supporters of John Kerry are holding vigil in front of his house, still hoping for a Kerry presidency.

And if more than a half-dozen actually believed in him Kerry might have carried a few more states. But honestly, just knowing that die-hard Kerry supporters are still dumb enough to be standing around in the snow and slush while even their fellow Taxachusites make fun of them is simply priceless. They’re probably the same people who spend every Halloween waiting for the Great Pumpkin, and I think I’ll save their picture and turn it into a nice Christmas ornament.

Clare Short accuses Bush of undermining the UN relief efforts.

United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster.

It’s not a rival coalition, it’s an option to use what works instead of waiting on an army of headless chickens to arrive from Belgium.

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world?s response.

Since all four have navies and resources in proximity, that would make sense.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

The reason she’s a former International Development Secretary is because she’s a nutcase backstabbing windbag whose heart is said to hemorrhage rather than just bleed and ooze.

With moonbats as thick as bees we’re hard pressed to find the apex of tsunami idiocy, but then we stumbled across the Centre for Research on Globalization (www.globalresearch.ca) and this insane article. It’s worth a visit just to read it, but please restrain yourself from their discussion forum and topics like “KERRY ,BUSH,ROCKEFELLER ARE MEMBERS OF THE ILLUMINIST SATANI“.

The article’s questions cover the gamut of paranoid stupidity, from the simple ones

1. Why were the Indian Ocean countries’ governments not informed?

2. Did US authorities monitoring seismographic data have knowledge of the earthquake prior to its actual occurrence at 00.57 GMT on the 26th of December?

3. Why is the US military Calling the Shots on Humanitarian Relief

To the inevitable

Why has a senior commander involved in the invasion of Iraq been assigned to lead the US emergency relief program?

…and Merry Whatever-It-Is-You-Call-This-Time-Between-Christmas-And-New-Year. We hope you had all the presents you’d wanted and that you got to spend some quality time with your loved ones.

There isn’t much that can be said about the tsunami that hasn’t already been said all over the Blogosphere, so we shall kindly refrain from adding to the din.

But why, oh why, oh WHY is it that every time we’re overcome by sorrow and compassion for our fellow human beings in need, we’re confronted with outrageous shit like this? (Link gracelessly lifted from LC & IB BMEWS)

So these deranged camel-bothering worshippers of a Pedophile Prophet would rather their fellow citizens perish than accept help from Eretz Israel?

Well, so be it.

You Sri Lankan heaps of medieval rat droppings can go fuck yourselves, die and rot in Hell.

And remember, as you’re watching your loved ones slowly die, that it was your “religion of peace” that made it happen. Remember that you brought it upon yourselves. Remember it as the vultures pick the eyeballs from your children’s corpses.

Then thank Allah for it.

Primitive shits.

[UPDATE: And then we have this crap (thanks to alert LC Rey), proving once and for all that the Pope has his funny hat on a bit too tight:

Vatican, Dec. 28 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican newspaper has denounced a decision by the Israeli army to deny emergency help to disaster victims in Sri Lanka.

Listen, you papist piss-brains, not only haven’t they denied a damn thing to those ungrateful little goat molesters, they actually offered and were turned down, because the turbaned tumblefucks were afraid that their Moon God might be offended by Eeeevil Jooooos being present.

We don’t know exactly where you pontificating pot heads get your “news” from, but you might want to check your sources. Here’s a hint: Al-Jizmeera is not a reliable source.]

[UPDATE the 2nd: And who says we can’t be apologetic in the Empire? LC & IB Laurence the Merciless has it down to a fine art. Take that, you ungrateful sods.]

[UPDATE the 3rd: Turns out that the whole she-bang about the Vatican exhibiting the ultimate in chutzpah was based on some third-rate clerk getting his Latin mixed up and translating the article wrong.

A most powerful lesson in not trying to cut corners in the translation department in order to save a few pennies, because it will come back to bite you. This is also known as the Golden You Get What You Pay For Rule?.]

It’s about time states learned to keep their nose out of our rivers.

Next summer, it will be legal to plunge into some Missouri rivers and grab catfish by hand - a type of fishing that is not for the faint of heart.
Known variously as noodling or hogging, handfishing has long been a misdemeanor punishable by fines, because state officials fear it depletes breeding-age catfish.

Whether or not the catfish are completely depleted, I’m sure they’re rather offended.

It can also be dangerous: Noodlers hold their breath for long periods under water and sometimes come up with fistfuls of agitated snakes or snapping turtles instead of fish.

“Monty, I’ll take what’s behind rock #3.” Or as they say, or should, “There are old noodlers and bold noodlers, but there are no bold 10-fingered noodlers.”

Missouri’s biological concerns are that handfishers, who go for the biggest fish they can wrestle from riverbanks or hollow logs, will take too many sexually mature fish from their underwater nests.

Now how a man grabs a sexually mature catfish is his own business, don’t you think?

So secretive are handfishers that they have formed a club called Noodlers Anonymous. A University of Missouri-Columbia professor who got the group’s cooperation in surveying its members found that most are men, average age about 40, living in rural areas.

Well of course they are, and bored and lonely too, but by making this strange practice illegal you just drive it underwater. As long as the noodlers don’t fish in the same spots as the dynamite fishermen there’s no real harm in it, but forgive me if I choose an electrically operated reel and computer controlled lure as my personal method of pissing off PETA.

How did this MEMRI translation of an article from Brussels escape our attention?

“Secret European military intelligence reports indicate the transformation of the American humanitarian mission in Iraq into a profitable trade in the American markets through the practice of American physicians extracting human organs from the dead and wounded, before they are put to death, for sale to medical centers in America. A secret team of American physicians follow the troops during their attacks on Iraqi armed men to ensure quick [medical] operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transferred to America for sale.

Mheh. I’m sure our crews of flying space monkeys are using UFO’s to fly the pilfered body parts to Roswell, too. The funniest part is the alleged pricing.

These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye.

Do these morons realize an American doctor would charge you more than that for recommending cranberry juice and Visine? They must be confusing our doctors with European socialist health-care systems, where the debate is about whether doctors in Holland should be immune from prosecution for secretly killing babies.

Nevertheless, the German media will undoubtedly report our organ thefts as fact, just as David Kaspar reports they’re doing about the oil. Over a year and a half later my SUV is still waiting impatiently for all that Iraqi crude…

I’m just getting caught back up after spending forever and a day at Dell, and of course as I was finishing up I heard something big happened down in Malaysia where most of their laptops are produced. To see if it could have an impact on shipments I shot over to Malaysian News.net, but from the look of things the top story at the time shouldn’t impact laptop prices.

Malaysian Prime Minister’s goats stolen

Kuala Lumpur, Dec 25. (PTI): Two goats belonging to Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi have been stolen from a government facility in the north of the country, a media report said today.

Holy moly! Is there no limit to man’s perfidity? Where were the minister’s caprine security forces? I simply had to read the gritty details of this earth shattering tale, skipping the site’s third link to something about a quake and tsunami.

The two Australian Boer goats were presented to Badawi a few years back by some businessmen and were placed under the care of a veterinary department in Penang state in northern Malaysia, ‘The Star’ daily said.

What kind of businessman gives goes up to a prime minister and gives him a pair of goats? What kind of thieves then plot to steal them? Will this true-life incident form the plot of the next Bond flick or give us “The Bourne Inanity”?

The pair of Boers worth about USD 1,300 were stolen along with 11 other goats after the thieves gained entry to the department’s compound by cutting its perimeter fencing, the report said.

OK, now I’ve got the theme music from “Mission Impossible” playing in my head as I picture a squad of ninja clad secret agents slipping through the fences, security lasers, and guard towers, then catapulting over the inner wall and hacking the security system to get into the holding pens. Obviously they couldn’t risk having the other goats trigger the alarms, so they took them too, hustling the whole group into unmarked white vans and speeding off into the dark night, tossing out smoke grenades to thwart any government jeeps that might pursue.

The theft was discovered by the veterinary department’s staff on Thursday when they conducted a head count, it said.

“They started shouting in German as the peaceful morning was shattered by the compound’s air-raid sirens, and within minutes diplomatic and emergency lines lit up all across the Pacific Rim. The goats were missing.”

Police were checking abattoirs and breeding farms to look for culprits and the animals, the paper said.

They can save the trouble since the goats are already halfway to Morocco on Dr. Evil’s private Airbus A340, enroute to Skull Island, but rest assured I’ll keep my finger on the pulse of this one, even though the true facts will remain shrouded in secrecy for decades.

We wonder when the Wailing & Gnashing of Teeth? from the GreenPissr crowd will begin about the Cantankerous Communist Cockbite’s plundering of Mother Gaia’s precious liquid largess, smack-dab in the middle of the beautiful waters around Cuba? (Hint: We won’t be holding our collective breath, that’s for sure. *Sound of crickets leaning against the alley wall, twiddling their tiny little cricket thumbs and smoking little cricket cigarettes…*)

HAVANA (AP) - President Communist Dictator Fidel Castro said a crude oil deposit has been discovered off Cuba containing up to 100 million barrels, good news for a country that imports about half the petroleum it needs.

We’d be willing to bet donuts to dollars that this story wouldn’t contain the words “good news for a country that imports about half the petroleum it needs” if it were the U.S. that had discovered a rather sizable oil deposit just off the coast of, saaaaay, Tampa Bay or Miami. It’d be spun so that the Eeeeeeeeevil BushCheneyHalliburtonBigOiiiiiiiilCabalr was plotting to cover the beaches of Florida with a 3-foot layer of heavy crude and had plans to dynamite every piece of coral within the Caribbean & Gulf of Mexico basins.

“This is the first discovery since 1999,” Castro said Friday in a speech to a closed session of the National Assembly. His comments were aired on state television Saturday.

Castro said the deposit was located off the coast of Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana, during an exploratory drilling. He said production at the site could begin during 2006.

And yet we’re still shelling out top dollar to the Shoddy Retardians? and other camel-fellators, while TENS OF BILLIONS of barrels of oil and TRILLIONS of cubic feet of gas are just offshore of the US and in ANWAR. Makes sense to us.

Cuba currently produces 75,000 barrels daily, about half of what it needs. It imports most of the rest, much of it on favorable terms from political ally Venezuela.

And that, right there, tells you all that you need to know about the current government in Venezuela….

Oil specialists believe Cuba’s waters in the Gulf of Mexico could contain large quantities of crude, just as those of Mexico and the United States do. Earlier explorations turned up only modest discoveries.

And which of these countries would have its economy castrated by the *spit* Kyoto Protocols *spit*? (We’ll give you some time to think that one over.)

We’ll be outside sitting in the Imperial F-150 SuperCrew o’ Doom? and revving the engine all night. We’ll peek in occasionally to check on your answers.

F.E.T.E.