I used to spend a lot of time on Fark. But I haven't visited the site in years. Why?

It just got kind of boring. Separating out the Boobies posts was probably a mistake; kind of like separating out the yeast from dough. And the stories in general got less interesting. Or...perhaps the rise of blogs is part of the reason. I get a lot more out of reading the odd little stories that my friends recommend, than out of the stuff that Drew picks.

Plus, let's face it: there ARE a lot of trolls and idiots among the Farkigentsia. They used to be a lot funnier, in aggregate.

Good, but it needs another panel with a smirking Dick Cheney overseeing the waterboarding and sodomizing of the Founding Fathers. That would make it perfect.

My five and a half year old son and I are huge Brad Bird fans. We love The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

We were both really looking forward to Ratatouille, too. Unfortunately it was a bit loud and kinetic for him. When Ego came in and threatened Linguini, that was the last straw - my son got scared, and asked to leave. So I took him out, and we missed the last half hour of the movie.

Oh well. Guess I'll have to wait until it comes out on DVD. Somehow movies seem less scary on a TV screen.

I do wish that some enterprising theater in our area would start showing old classics at a reasonable volume - say, The Iron Giant, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Yellow Submarine, perhaps The Sound of Music...

A little heavy-handed. But I can sympathize; there's no way to really satirize this "administration" and the right wing lunatics that still support them. These people simply exceed every standard of sanity.

Even Jonathan Swift would be challenged to invent an extreme which Bush/Cheney wouldn't actually end up not only performing, but exceeding. If they were forcing mothers to eat their own babies, I wouldn't be that surprised.

Jeeze. Not even one mention of the many ancient Armenian churches in Turkey which were razed by the Turkish government, pursuant to their continuing policy of genocide denial?

How about THOSE ruins, Gary - did you miss those?

HEY! Didn't you read the honorable Senator's statement? He's already discussed this whole thing with God, and the Big Guy has forgiven him.

PERIOD! END OF SENTENCE! So that's the end of the matter. How DARE you try to smear a good, Godly man like Senator Vitter with these baseless charges?

"Baseless", you ask? Why yes. Forgiveness from God means that the whole thing never happened. And only a godless secular liberal Democrat would think otherwise.

Speaking of which, if any Democrats are on that madam's list, I look forward to hearing all about it in every major media outlet. And the great thing is that the Democrats won't be able to play the "God Forgives Me" card, because everyone knows that God doesn't listen to Democrats.

JoshuasGrandma, it's true that the Genocide was ordered by the Ottoman Empire. It's also true that there are almost no survivors left, and I doubt that many Turkish perpetrators are alive either.

But the current Turkish government has continued to deny that the Genocide ever happened. They use all of their diplomatic muscle, along with large amounts of money, to get other countries to go along with their program of denial. They intimidated the United States Congress into killing a bill recognizing the Genocide by threatening to block the US from using bases on their soil. They fund online activists and spend huge sums on public relations. They've funded academic posts in major American colleges and universities specifically with the goal of giving their denial academic credibility, although the historical evidence for the Genocide is overwhelming.

It's the same approach that American big business and the Republican Party took towards global warming and earlier, the link between cancer and smoking - insist over and over that black is white, and then use the "controversy" as evidence that no one can ever decide what the truth is and the whole issue should just be forgotten. Except that big business is finally realizing that global warming will be a disaster for them, too. The Turkish government continues their program of denial as vigorously as they ever did.

My grandparents lost a lot of relatives in the Genocide, including many brothers and sisters - more than ten each, I believe (families were large in that time and place). They were young when it happened, and they bore the scars of that horror until the day they died. I have some relatives that I will never know, because the Turks took Armenian babies away from their mothers and gave them to Turkish families to raise, as Turks - they never knew their ancestry, nor that they were being raised by the people who had in many cases killed their families.

I don't hate Turks. But denial of the Genocide is an atrocity in itself, one that should shock and outrage any civilized person. By continuing to cover up the Genocide, even going so far as to persecute and prosecute those of their own people who refer to it, the Turkish government has earned a full share of the guilt for that crime.

If the German government denied that the Holocaust had ever occurred, and did their best to confuse or erase all historical record of it, would that be acceptable to you? Because that is exactly what the Turkish government is doing.

The ruins of Armenian cathedrals can be found in many places in Turkey. Gary's article about the beauty of Turkey's ruins was like reading an article about the lovely camp at suburban Auschwitz that completely failed to mention the people who died there.