The management of a new Hawaiian TV station is horrified at the realization that the last three call letters “UNT” do not lead to a particularly euphonic four-letter station name, considering that the first letter will assuredly not be “W.”

They apparently never noticed what their own station name spelled. Neither did the FCC, who would fine somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars if you reported this story on the air and pronounced these FCC-approved call letters as a phonetic whole.

Incidentally, in the same set of approvals, the company now also owns “KWTF.” (As in “WTF?”) Fitting.

Link via our Trebekistan pal Ken Jennings, whose blog you may find habit-forming.

A Sudanese official named Ahmad Harun is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

He has not yet been arrested, however.

Instead, as the L.A. Times just pointed out, he is currently serving as a Sudanese Minister of Humanitarian Affairs.

Incidentally, I mention this in the Sudan chapter of my next book, which will be out next month. But the book is a series of very short essays, so Harun gets all of two or three sardonic sentences. All I could squeeze in. I’ll be eager to see this given wider attention.

The Times story gives photos and a much fuller picture, including some very dark conjecture about Harun’s eventual poetic fate. Well done, and good reading.

The 2007 Rocketbelt Convention will be held on August 11th and 12th at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station.

Judging from the photos, it’s safe family fun.

Bring the kids! Bring extras, in case you lose one! Strap ’em in! Let ’em fly! Find ’em later!

How on earth did I not know about this?

I mean, rocketbelts!

How is it possible there aren’t carpools forming from every corner of the nation?

Link via BoingBoing, which you must read every day.

Not a military invasion; quite the opposite.

U.S. immigration to Canada is now at a 30-year high. The rate has doubled since Bush was elected.

Meanwhile, the rate of Canadian immigration to the U.S. has dropped 20% in the last 12 months alone.

While we’re on it, the Canadian dollar is now worth US$0.94. It was US$0.66 when Bush took office. As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the dollar has lost about a third of its value against the euro (not to mention a scary number of other world currencies) since Bush took office.

The greenback is now down over 42 percent against the loonie on Bush’s watch.

Where can I trade in my Benjamins for some Robert Bordens?

Currently dubbing over some old VHS tapes onto DVD; if you’ve read Trebekistan, you know that I need to fit my life into far fewer boxes.

I was a fan of Walker when I first saw it about 15 years ago, and I couldn’t help but stop and watch it again while it was dubbing tonight. I like it even better now. It’s British director Alex Cox (the same guy who did the classic Repo Man) allegorically making a point about modern US foreign policy by retelling the true story of a brilliant American nutjob named William Walker, who 150 years ago was financed by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to "stabilize" Nicaragua — which is to say, protect Vanderbilt’s profitable pre-Panama Canal land/sea transport route through the country.

Walker not only "stabilized" things, he took over completely, declaring himself President of Nicaragua; the US government shortly recognized him as such. In the process, however, Walker betrayed everything his expedition claimed to stand for — democracy, liberation, freedom, etc. — eventually even instituting slavery and aspiring to subjugate all of Central America. Walker betrayed Vanderbilt, too, however; that was his undoing. The master cut the puppet’s strings, and Walker’s regime quickly ended.

Unhip to the game and more desperate than ever to believe that he still had a special god-chosen purpose, Walker kept trying to invade the region until he was finally executed by the Honduran government in 1860. He was famous across the US by this time, popular among the same crowd who would today learn their decency, history, and reasoning skills from talk radio. Now long-forgotten in the US (where his story is embarrassing at best), he’s still fairly and bitterly well-remembered in Central America.

Cox’s film was made in Nicaragua in 1987, while the Contra war was still raging. It’s an angry film, obviously, but what strikes me on a midlife viewing is the surprising degree of compassion that Walker actually shows to its subject, despite using him as an occasionally heavy-handed object lesson. Walker is never once seen as less than sincere in his madness, and it’s precisely that appearance of honesty amid utter self-delusion that attracts a cult of followers who can never allow themselves to see the grotesque horrors which result.

The parallels are so clear — not just to one side in one war, but to damn near any rationalization of violence as part of a better, higher good, anywhere — and the brilliant black comedy of it all is so relentlessly drawn, that I’m surprised the film hasn’t become more of a cult favorite among the current antiwar crowd. Ed Harris is a joy to watch (and occasionally presages his Oscar-nominated turn in Pollock) as the inspired madman, Cox’s intentional anachronisms (Walker, for example, is named Time magazine’s Man of the Year) are somehow both over-the-top and perfect, and Joe Strummer’s haunting soundtrack may still be the best work he has ever done.

It’s a hard find on DVD; I’m not sure it was ever even released in the US in that format. Amazon only carries the European DVD, which won’t work on most North American players, but they still have the VHS here. Meanwhile, Alex Cox’s website has more info if you’re curious.

Other stuff I’m dubbing today: a reel of Nixon campaign TV ads from 1968, when the Vietnam war was about as old as the Iraq war is now. The level of sophistication (which is to say, sheer facile nonsense) of Nixon’s claim that he could do a better job than LBJ, without being clear on details at the time, and without any basis in retrospect, would be depressingly familiar to most of us, I think.

But Walker moves that depressing realization back over 150 years, with moments of some of the darkest humor you will ever see.

PS — I should add that there’s also a little more about the historic Walker in the next book, about which you will soon hear much. Stay tuned.