Gary Gygax is now dead as General Franco:

Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys with vivid imaginations, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

This is the man who, other than religious figures, is responsible for more teenage boys not getting laid than any other person in history.

But at least he gave them something to do, while not having a sex life or developed social skills.

Dumbyah must be oh so proud of his latest accomplishment:

Oil Prices Pass Inflation-Adjusted Record

Setting an all-time record, oil prices rose to nearly $104 a barrel on Monday morning, exceeding their inflation-adjusted high reached in the early 1980s during the second oil shock.

Oil futures rose as much as $2.11 to $103.95 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That level tops the record set in April 1980 of $39.50 a barrel, which would translate to $103.76 a barrel in today’s money.

Record oil prices, a faltering economy, $3.5 trillion in debt, economy sliding into recession, never-ending military occupation, destabilized Middle East. That’s some legacy.

It’s nice to know the Lord has a spokesman:

God is disgusted with California legislators – at least some of them, according to an evangelical chaplain who ruffled feathers this week in the same Capitol where he leads Bible studies for lawmakers.

Ralph Drollinger, who played basketball at UCLA in the 1970s and now heads Capitol Ministries, criticized lawmakers who participate in a separate fellowship group that embraces people of all faiths without insisting that they accept Jesus Christ as Messiah.

“Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior,” Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.

SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

You gotta hand it to the boys and girls at the National Review. After 5 years of pimping a failed war and an imbecilic presidency, they’ve endorsed a candidate who, in terms of sheer guts and personal fortitude, makes the incredible Mr. Limpet look like Vince Lombardi.

And the endorsement is a ringing one, too:

Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything — all the traits, all the positions — we are looking for. . . . It is true that he has less foreign-policy experience than Thompson [ed: he's the really lazy one, in case you forgot] . . . . It is true that he has reversed some of his positions. . . . Romney has been plagued by the sense that his is a passionless, paint-by-the-numbers conservatism. . . . In this most fluid and unpredictable Republican field, we vote for Mitt Romney.

Vote for Romney — he’s likely better than a dose of clap.

More: Great minds, and all that.

I had that dream again last night. . .

No, not the one where Tera Patrick (I don’t even know who she is, but Paul keeps talking about her) licks a carton of Cool Whip off . . . well, not that one.

And not the one, where I turn into a giant cockroach, or start blogging about refrigerator magnets.

The other one.

The one where it’s the end of Fall Semester in college, and I haven’t been to more than a handful of classes all year, haven’t read any of the material, haven’t gone to a single discussion session, and I have no idea what the class is about and no chance of passing even a single class. And all my classes next semester are a continuation of the classes I’m miserably failing this semester.

Then I wake up in a sweat. After a minute, I realize I graduated more than a decade ago, already finished my graduate degree, and never have to go to school again.

I hate that fucking dream. But talking to others, it’s a very common one.

Thinking about it, this dream must be George Bush’s waking nightmare.

Imagine — you’re the leader of the free world. You stake your reputation and your presidency on a pile of bullshit from Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” Feith, Richard “someday they’ll be naming town squares in Iraq after W” Perle and a bunch of other clueless fucking assholes collectively known as the Project for a New American Century.

Meanwhile, you ignore the CIA, DIA and all the intelligence agencies who prepare a National Intelligence Estimate which warns you that Iraq is a total clusterfuck waiting to happen — an irreconcilable mess of sectarian, ethnic, and tribal conflicts which will likely explode into widespread violence and civil war if we invade the country.

In order to sell the war, you make a whole bunch of claims that Iraq has nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, even though there are intelligence analysts from this and other countries warning you that these claims are unproven, based on unreliable drunkards (named “Curveball”, to boot) and very likely not true. Like the student who hasn’t been to a lecture, or read a book, and tells his parents he’s going to ace all his classes, in order to get that check from them.

Then you go ahead and invade, and after thumping Saddam’s weak, eroded, and demoralized military (which, paradoxically, supposedly posed a grave threat to the world) you declare “Mission Accomplished!” to the world — like you might tell your folks you got an A+ on the exam, even though you haven’t actually taken it yet.

To top things off, you completely fuck up the occupation of Iraq. You appoint an incompetent to run the Coalitional Provisional Authority. He fires the army and sends them home with their fucking weapons. You let the Pentagon run the occupation, pushing aside the State Department which has some expertise in the region. Your hand-picked administrator mangles reconstruction, hiring expensive foreigners who can’t finish the job. He hires rightwing twits straight out of college with no experience, no language skills, and no expertise - to run a fucking country. You agree with Wolfowitz that it shouldn’t take more than a nominal force to secure the country. Somehow, the collection of idiots you put in charge of the country lost 12 billion dollars, millions of barrels of oil, and 190,000 firearms. And plunged the country and the region into chaos. Your “War on Terror” rhetoric aside, the number of significant terrorist incidents worldwide goes from about 200 in 2003, to over 14,000 in 2006.

In short, you completely fuck up the most significant and aggressive military/political action since the Vietnam War, and you do so in a way that makes the guys who ran the Vietnam War look like fucking geniuses.

So every night you have this dream — the most important single effort of your Presidency is completely screwed up. You were unprepared, you didn’t listen, you did everything wrong, and now there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it. Only when you wake up, you find out it’s real. If one were actually a student, and actually fucked up a semester, in a few months you would flunk out, get expelled, and it’s over. In the case of President Bush, the nightmare is going to last nearly 6 years, because you lied about and covered up the extent of the exploding clusterfuck in Iraq long enough to win a second term before you were discovered and exposed as an incompetent fraud.

Every day Bush rises, Iraq is a disaster. He cannot retreat without admitting his Presidency as one of the greatest failures in history. Yet every day he stays simply magnifies the extent of the disaster.

Two years ago, military historian Martin van Creveld referred to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as “the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them.” Last night Jon Stewart quipped that Iraq was like a “magic hat,” into which disappeared not only 190,000 weapons and 12 billion dollars, but also 40 points of Bush’s approval rating.

The truly unfortunate thing, however, is that we, the American people, are forced to live the nightmare with our feckless and visionless chief executive. It is our trillions of dollars, and our sons and daughters, who are sinking into the morass of Iraq, while Bush tries to play out the rest of his term.