Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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No matter how much you like John Kerry, this is really f***ing funny. This is even funnier.
Josh Marshall: It's certainly true that Mr. Kerry said certain things in his war protestor days that can now be used against him with some audiences. But until he was well into middle-age President Bush's most noteworthy public utterances seem to have been limited to various invocations and inflections of 'par-TAY' and reciting the alphabet under legal compulsion.
Everybody else has already mentioned this, but I'll chime in just for good measure.
This afternoon, Pakistan's interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, announced that Pakistani forces had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The timing of this announcement should be of particular interest to readers of The New Republic. Earlier this month, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari broke the story of how the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to apprehend high-value targets (HVTs) in time for the November elections--and in particular, to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Although the capture took place in central Pakistan "a few days back," the announcement came just hours before John Kerry will give his acceptance speech in Boston.
Of course, assuming this guy is who they say he is, the arrest is an unquestionably good thing. However, given that he was arrested on Sunday and the news held until a few hours before Kerry was to speak, you'd have to be a stroke victim not to have your eyebrows go up so high they start travelling down the back of your neck. Now who's playing politics with national security?
By the National Archives, the 9/11 Commission, and the Ashcroft Justice Department, no less.
Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. [...] Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said officials there "are confident that there aren't any original documents missing in relation to this case." She said in most cases, Mr. Berger was given photocopies to review, and that in any event officials have accounted for all originals to which he had access. That included all drafts of a so-called after-action report prepared by the White House and federal agencies in 2000 after the investigation into a foiled bombing plot aimed at the Millennium celebrations.
[...]
Some of the allegations have related to the possibility that drafts with handwritten notes on them may have disappeared, but Ms. Cooper said archives staff are confident those documents aren't missing either. Daniel Marcus, general counsel of the 9/11 Commission, said the panel had been assured twice by the Justice Department that no originals were missing and that all of the material Mr. Berger had access to had been turned over to the commission. "We are told that the Justice Department is satisfied that we've seen everything that the archives saw," and "nothing was missing," he said.
Sloppy enough to have his security clearance revoked? Yes. Evidence of malicious intent? Not a shred. So after hyperventilating over the ridiculous-on-its-face story that Berger was stuffing documents in his socks, how do you think Fox News and the right-wing blogs will cover this? Hint: listen for the pin drop.
Now here comes the real-world testing.
Sea power may be harnessed to generate enough renewable electricity to power the UK's smallest city. Developers plan to put five turbines in Ramsey Sound, off Pembrokeshire, to produce electricity from tidal power. The company behind the scheme, Tidal Hydraulic Generators, claim it will generate enough clean electricity to power St David's, population 1,600.
The plan is the latest in a series of schemes for renewable energy being considered for the Welsh coastline. Earlier this month, Welsh assembly members backed plans for a large wind farm off the south Wales coast. After a public inquiry, the assembly's planning committee approved proposals for 30 400ft turbines at Scarweather sands off Porthcawl. A renewable energy charity is also in the early stages of a project which could see tidal energy turbines built off the coasts of Swansea and Rhyl.
Two strange new species of worms, without eyes or stomachs or even mouths, have been discovered living on the bones of dead whales in California's Monterey Bay. [...] The worms, ranging from 1-inch to 2½-inches long, have colorful, feathery plumes that serve as gills and green "roots" that work their way into the bones of dead whales. Bacteria living in the worms digest the fats and oils in the whalebone.
[...]
The worms found eating the whale bones were females. "Initially we were puzzled why every worm was a female," Vrijenhoek said in a telephone interview. He said Rouse took some worms to his laboratory for study and discovered tiny male worms living inside the females. There were as many as 50 to 100 males within each female, Vrijenhoek said. The males still contained bits of yolk, as if they had never developed past their larval stage, but they also contained large amounts of sperm. The female worms, regardless of size, were full of eggs, the researchers noted.
The researchers, who were studying clam ecology via a robotic submarine when they found the whale carcass, weren't sure what they had at first. The worms had no segments, no gut, and no mouth, and resembled miniature versions of the giant tube worms found near thermal vents. DNA analysis shows they are indeed related to the vent worms, which can grow to a length of ten feet. The new genus will be called Osedax, Latin for bone eater, and the two species rubiplumus for their red feathery gills and frankpressi in honor of Frank Press, a recently retired former president of the National Academy of Sciences.
Taken over the four days of the convention (but before Kerry's speech), 1,001 likely voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.2
Overall
Kerry/Edwards 48
Bush/Cheney 43
Other 2
Unsure 8
Those numbers are the same as the last sample (July 6-7), except that 3% of Bush's support moved to the unsure column.
With 3rd Parties
Kerry 46
Bush 41
Nader 3
Peroutka 1
Badnarik 0
Other 1
Unsure 8
Looks good, but the details are very interesting. Kerry has closed the gender gap for the time being. Kerry leads among men 47-46, among women 49-40. Regionally, Bush leads in the midwest 48-43, while Kerry leads in the east 55-33, in the west 49-42, and in the south 48-46. That's right, it's a tie in the south. Granted, the numbers for men and the south are well within the margin of error, but that's a lot closer than Democrats have been in a long time with either of those demographics.
"Do you think George W. Bush deserves to be reelected as president of the United States, or is it time for someone new?" 42% say he deserved reelection, 51% say somebody new, numbers that are essentially unchanged since March. Most people's minds are apparently made up; I'm not sure these numbers have much room to move. And of course, historically the undecideds have broken toward the challenger. Looks promising.
More details:
Job Rating for Bush - Excellent/Good 44%, Fair/Poor 56%. In the July 6-7 sample, these numbers were 49-51.
Favorability Ratings for Bush - Favorable 52, Unfavorable 47 (formerly 56-43).
Carole King sings "You've Got a Friend," then that horrific John Kerry version of "Proud Mary," then the cheesiest version of "Celebration" recorded. All the while with crowd shots of rhythmless delegates dancing. My spinal cord is slapping me for sitting through it. It's like the world's lamest Super Bowl halftime show.
Update (11:00 pm): And the balloons drop to the crappiest of crappy Van Halen. The horror, the horror.
Blogging over at Kevin Drum's, Amy Sullivan asks what Kerry's theme song for his acceptance speech should be and places tentative bets on Springsteen. Myself, I think it should be "God of Thunder" by KISS. And he should rise out of the stage floor amid a huge cloud of blue smoke, with flash pots erupting, wearing eight-inch platforms and studded leather and breathe fire out over the audience.
That would catch everybody by surprise.
Update (7:45 pm): And Bush should totally use 2000 Man. Kerry gets to be Gene Simmons because of his previously noted bass-slappin' fury, but which KISS member do you think Bush would be?
Not happy with your job? Get on some meds, you whiner.
A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better. "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.
Too bad that prescription drug plan isn't all that, huh?
(via kos)
John Kerry will accept the nomination tonight, so only a few hours remain for you to contribute to the Kerry/Edwards campaign. Due to the late start of the GOP convention, the Bush/Cheney campaign can continue to raise money for another five weeks. Money matters. Put it where your mouth is (don't put money in your mouth, though - that's nasty).
Quit honking at me, you whippersnappers!
A Milwaukee man got off with a warning Tuesday after tying up traffic on the interstate in a motorized wheelchair. The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department says the 73-year-old man was traveling about 5 to 7 mph in the distress lane on Interstate 43. Motorists who were trapped behind him, tied up in traffic, called authorities and a sheriff's deputy caught up with him around 3 p.m. The man was headed to a doctor's appointment and took to the road after the transportation service that was supposed to pick him up failed to show. Wheelchairs aren't allowed on the interstate, but the sheriff's department gave the man a warning rather than a $159 ticket.
Turn signal blinking the entire way, I'll bet.
Being such an absurd question, I always figured once I got rich and famous and Barbara Walters asked it of me, I would answer with the appropriately absurdist, "a toiletry." However, not only is the question no longer absurd, it isn't even a theoretical question.
Forget those cold gravestones, now you can get your human DNA bonded within that of a tree courtesy of Biopresence. Dubbed as 'Living Memorials', the company has figured out a way to encode human DNA underneath the DNA of a plant cell without damaging it genetically. Unfortunately for us, you can't have one for now until the company is operational. Meanwhile, you can catch a glimpse at the Science Museum in London till mid 2005. [look out for the bathrooms, though -a]
Also via Sensory Impact, an amazingly beautiful design for a Baha'i temple in Santiago, Chile.
One advantage and drawback of working in a building full of statisticians is never being the smartest person in the room. I wrote in amusement yesterday about the St. Louis Fed positing that belief in Hell correlated with lower corruption and higher per capita income ("Get back to work."). This morning, I received an email from a few cubes over:
Oh, BTW- on that hell/corruption thing, the p-value was 0.047. I saw that last night & found their raw data. Of course, they failed to control for all kinds of covariates that could explain what's really going on... case in point, instead of "fear of hell" substitute "porn" and you'll get about the same correlation.
[Here is] the original article, data and graphs. A quick read shows that they didn't look at any alternative hypotheses or really bother with covariates. I don't have time at the moment, but you should always be suspicious when they go to ranks when their distribution to start with is pretty good.
Sweet.
Update (8:10 pm): Kevin Drum and Daniel Drezner weighed in on the subject. Two word summaries: "pretty weak" (DD) and "simplistic crap" (KD).
Ron Reagan Jr's line-in-the-sand speech on stem cell research at the Democratic Convention ("In a few months, we will face a choice [...] We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology." Ouch.) has sent many GOP talking heads into fits of apoplexy at the apostasy. However, they have always distrusted the former president's son. Saint Nancy, on the other hand, they can't criticize so readily, although some of them sure would like to do just that.
Much to the dismay of the Bush campaign, Nancy Reagan has just said no to appearing at the Republican National Convention next month. GOP strategists had hoped the former First Lady and Hollywood actress would make a cameo appearance onstage after a video tribute to her late husband, particularly after her Bush-bashing son, Ron, agreed to speak at the Democratic convention last night. [...] Republican officials refrained from publicly criticizing Nancy Reagan for the no-show. Privately, however, some were upset as well as disappointed by the decision, which has been known to the White House for some time.
"I don't think she could have missed the symbolic significance of her son going to their convention and her not going to ours," a senior GOP official told the Daily News. [...] A downcast senior GOP official confirmed Nancy Reagan had never committed to appearing at the convention, but was nevertheless dubious of the official explanation. "The 'not feeling up to it' line is bull----," the official said. "Something happened in the last month, and whatever it was was real." Aides to the former President did not return calls seeking comment.
(via the undercapitalized skippy the bush kangaroo)
One of the most persistent and galling traits of the modern Republican Party is their blinkered insistence that any international opponent is somehow redolent of the Axis powers of 60 years ago. There is no conflict they will not recast in terms of confronting the Nazis. Noriega? The new Hitler. Milosevic? The new Hitler. Qaddafi? Used to be the new Hitler, now the new Theodor Heuss. Saddam? Used to be the new Hitler, now the new Goering-in-Nuremberg. Al Qaeda? Well, let's go to the instant replay from two days ago.
Dick Cheney: "I think as a nation, we are facing one of the great challenges in our history. We're facing an enemy today that is every bit as intent on destroying us as were the Axis powers in World War II, or the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
Now, for every time I have read a right-winger say that comparing Iraq to Viet Nam is ridiculous until we approach 58,000 lost lives, I'd like to assert the ridiculousness of comparing our confrontation with al Qaeda to WWII until we have lost 400,000 lives. Seems fair enough to me. But Juan Cole says it much better:
Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.
So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).
As they say, read the rest. A problem we must confront? Sure. On a par with the Axis powers? Cracka, please.
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high tension wires down...
GO GO HOGZILLA!
Around these parts, they are calling it Hogzilla: a 12-foot-long wild hog recently killed on a plantation and now quickly becoming a part of local legend. The plantation's owner claims the hog weighed 1,000 pounds and had 9-inch tusks. But few people have actually seen the hog -- the only proof being a photo that shows the dead beast hanging from a rope. Whether the hog ever actually existed or is some sort of Faulknerian myth, it has definitely been the topic of conversation in small towns across southern Georgia.
[...]
The picture is all Griffin has to back up his claims. He and Ken Holyoak, owner of the plantation, buried the beast on the property and did not want to hassle with slaughtering it since the meat of large feral hogs is typically not very good. Holyoak said he decided that the hog's head also wasn't worth keeping because it was too large to mount on a wall. He said the head has the diameter of a tire on a compact car.
[...]
No one maintains official records on hog kills in Georgia. But Department of Natural Resources biologist Kent Kammermeyer, who helped write a booklet on feral-hog problems in the state, said he has never heard of one as large as Hogzilla. Holyoak said the plantation's previous record was a 695-pound hog shot several years ago.
And if you're creeped out by that, you should see the size of the spider that wrote how terrific, radiant, and humble Hogzilla was. I smell Photoshop in this story...
Will Ferrell does Cowboy Dubya in a new ACT ad.
"I'll use this weapon on that devil horse if I have to."
And when I say wants, I mean it. devirginizemarc.com
My name is Marc, and I'm a virgin and I'm okay with it. I don't say this with pride or judgement or anything else; I say it as a matter of fact. My virginity is not based on religion, nor is it fueled by fear. It doesn't involve manipulation, it's not the result of any physical deformity, and it's in spite of my hormones, not due to any lack of them. In short, up until now, just a few months shy of my 27th birthday, I am a virgin for one simple reason: the dream of making a Web site just like this.
Or not. So here's the truth: I'm a virgin because I'm waiting for the right person. Sex to me is an expression of a feeling deeper than anything I can explain, [and having never had it, he can assert that with complete confidence - ed.] and it's only in the midst of that feeling that I want to have sex with anyone.
I've been in four committed relationships -- none were quite right. Too young, no chemistry, her cheating, too much fighting... whatever the reason, all four failed. And they were all great girls. Maybe I'm meant to come upon one of them again, and maybe it'll work the second time around.
But just in case that messy strategy doesn't pan out, he's taking applications over the web. So ladies, if you're in the Greater Philadelphia area, his interests include naps, Seinfeld, SQL, Christmas lights, and passionate love-making [he guesses -ed.]. Also, he "can listen to Dave Matthews, Guster, Pink Floyd, Toby Keith, Yanni, Bertie Higgins, Neil Diamond, and Elvis on the same CD" and he follows "a very low-carb diet." Just remember who found him for you and let me know how it went.
(via metafilter)
CNN: Comic actor charged with rape in Tennessee
You know, rape is never funny. Unless you rape a clown.
The Poor Man: "Ah, the Democratic convention. It's No Exit choreographed by Busby Berkeley..."
Or your eternal soul will be roasted over a lake of fire.
The St Louis Fed drew on work by outside economists who studied 35 countries, including the United States, European nations, Japan, India and Turkey and found that religion shed some useful light. "In countries where large percentages of the population believe in hell, there seems to be less corruption and a higher standard of living," the St. Louis Fed said in its July quarterly review.
For instance, 71 percent of the U.S. population believe in hell and the country boasts the world's highest per capita income, according to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report and 1990-1993 World Values Survey. Ireland, not far behind the United States in terms of income, likewise has a healthy fear of a nether world with 53 percent of the population acknowledging hell's existence.
This must be the most productive, least corrupt city on Earth.
Hell's main export is, appropriately, kitsch. Among other things, it has a "fully non-accredited" college, Damnation University -- DamU to alumni -- that sells half-singed diplomas, and a small post office in the back of the general store popular with irate taxpayers and recent divorcees. Also a motorcycle dealership and an ice cream parlor, which bear mentioning by virtue of being the only other businesses in town.
This week on Stupid Republican Tricks:
Yesterday [Chuck Bradley] set fire to almost 30 pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream to protest statements by the company's co-founder, Ben Cohen, who has publicly called President Bush a liar. The pints were taken from the Midway Corner Grocery, which Bradley owned for 21 years before he sold it to one of his sons. The protest drew an amused response from Cohen.
"What a waste of some really great ice cream," Cohen said in an e-mail statement yesterday. "I didn't think you could burn ice cream," he added.
You can ... sort of. Bradley and 20 or so people watched the pile of pints turn into a river of sweet-smelling gooey sludge.
Take that, you sweet-toothed commie bastard. All those pints he bought from you at wholesale, well, he'll just refuse to make a profit on them. How you like them apples?
Charlene Harris brought her two sons, Cheney, 2, and Jay, 4, to the protest after learning about it from a Scott County Republican Party e-mail. Harris said she was happy to bring her children to the ice cream burning, but she knows they didn't understand what was happening.
"It was kind of hard to explain to them why the ice cream was bad," she said. "We do support the president, but they like ice cream."
That's right, she named one of her kids Cheney, and she takes them to public burnings of ice cream that hates America.
Scott Niven notes that the Cassini probe has spotted the Death Star.
Actually, it's Mimas, one of Saturn's many moons. Mimas is only 244 miles wide, while the crater (named Herschel, after the astronomer who discovered the moon) is 84.5 miles wide, meaning the impact that created it would have come within a hair of disintegrating the moon. The mountain rising from the middle of the six-mile-deep crater, at four miles tall, is nearly the size of Everest. The picture was snapped from a distance of about a million miles. Back in 1980, Voyager passed within 264,000 miles from the moon and sent back some much better defined snapshots.
Wow. I mean, really. Wow.
Obama's was the only speech I got to see in full last night and once he got rolling, I knew I was seeing the ascent of a political star (transcript). Particularly when he got to this part:
For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper -- that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
As Bill Clinton said the previous night, "They need a divided America. We don't." Get used to hearing the name Barack Obama. You'll be hearing it a lot.
Tonight's lineup: Bill Richardson, Jennifer Granholm, Lt. Col. Steve Brozak, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards.
One thing that is now apparently part of the modern presidential campaign is the laying-on-of-hands photo montage -- the key being visuals of the metaphorical handing off of the political torch and ethereal transmission of politico-cultural Mojo. I guess Clinton got this started off with those pictures of himself at the Boys Nation ceremony with President Kennedy back in something like 1963.
[...]
On one of the floors of the Fleet Center -- the third or fourth, I think -- there's a small gallery of Kerry photos. And if you make the rounds of them you see that there's a laying-on-of-hands image for almost every slice of the Democratic soul. Of course, there's Kerry with Jack Kennedy. But Kerry was actually a hip dude. So, for instance, there's a young Kerry with John Lennon. And then Kerry with Coretta Scott King. And, actually, in a highly literary flourish, there's even John Kerry with Arthur Miller of all people. (A friend of mine pointed out that there's even a double-layered Marilyn Monroe subtext in that one.)
How many young aspiring politicos are throwing elbows to get a handshake photo with Kerry these days, I wonder?
...but somebody's got to do it.
Immigration officers are having to pore through naked pictures of hundreds of exotic dancers to keep imposters out of Canada, the Toronto Sun reported Tuesday. Foreign strippers planning to table dance in clubs must now provide photos of themselves with no clothes on to qualify for a visa for Canada, said immigration officials. [...] The potential dancers have to prove they can dance in the nude, immigration lawyer Mendel Green said Monday. "They can't be partially nude," he said. "If they don't have pictures in the nude, they are not going to wiggle their bottoms in Canada."
In a related story, HR staff at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (the Canuck version of the INS) report being overwhelmed by the surge in applications for positions as immigration officers and have begun turning away jobseekers at the door. One applicant (picture) remarked, "Worst. Interview. Ever."
If you didn't watch the convention last night, or if you watched it on one of the news channels that insisted on having their anchors in front of a camera as often as humanly possible, you missed a rousing speech from Reverend David Alston, who at 21 served under Kerry as a gunner on the swift boat in Viet Nam. A transcript won't begin to do it justice, because it's damn near impossible to beat southern black preachers when it comes to timing and delivery in speeches (streaming video is available at c-span.org, but their servers seem slammed at the moment). The Kerry campaign should get Alston out on the trail early and often. However, in case you missed it, here's the transcript.
The other transcripts:
Al Gore
Jimmy Carter
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
Also, Jim Lehrer's interview with Carter after the speech is worth a read.
I never thought I'd see the day where I agreed with Andrew Sullivan over Billmon. I'd better schedule a physical exam.
Everybody is focused (and rightfully so) on the presidential race now that the convention is underway. Plenty of words will be written analyzing tonight's power lineup of Gore, Carter, Clinton, and Clinton. My quick reactions:
I'll leave the deeper analysis to those more talented than me, so I'd like to turn to the gubernatorial races instead, if you don't mind. The GOP currently has a 28-22 lead in governorships. Eleven are on the ballot in 2004; I was surprised the number was that low. Of those, six are currently held by Democrats and five by the GOP, though in two from each camp, the incumbent isn't running. A quick rundown of the eleven races follows.
Each state is listed with its current executive.
DE Ruth Ann Minner (D)
Former judge Bill Lee is the GOP candidate, but Minner is probably the safest Democrat in the list. This should be a walk.
IN Joe Kernan (D)
Kernan assumed the governorship after Governor Frank O'Bannon died in September and is facing former White House budget director Mitch Daniels. The latest poll I could find (7/15) gave Daniels a 32-26 edge, but with a whopping 41% undecided, this race is anybody's guess. Still, it's Indiana, so betting on anything but Red is bucking serious odds.
MO Bob Holden (D)
Governor Holden has had a difficult first term, earning the nickname "One Term Bob," which is never a good sign. State Auditor Claire McCaskill is challenging Holden in next week's Democratic primary and polls show the two in a dead heat, with McCaskill surging. Against the Republican frontrunner, Secretary of State Matt Blunt, the most recent poll shows Blunt with a slight 44-42 lead over Holden (within the margin of error) but McCaskill topping Blunt 45-37. My money's on McCaskill in both the primary and the general.
MT Judy Martz (R)
The race to replace Martz pits Democrat Brian Schweitzer against Secretary of State Bob Brown. An early poll showed Schweitzer leading Brown by 10 percentage points in the campaign to succeed Martz, whose first term was marked by dismal approval ratings. Montana normally votes Republican, but Schweitzer came within 4 points of defeating GOP Sen. Conrad Burns in 2000. Schweitzer served for seven years with the Montana State USDA Farm Service Agency committee and has been active in state agricultural policy. Brown's biggest issue at the moment, believe it or not, is that Schweitzer bought a pickup truck and an SUV last year, and went to Idaho to make the purchase, rather than buying from a Montana dealer.
NH Craig Benson (R)
John Lynch and Paul McEachern are vying to face Benson. Benson's approval ratings have dropped sharply over the past two months and recent polling puts Lynch within the margin of error, while the lesser-known McEachen trails by more. Howard Dean's recent endorsement of Lynch has boosted his campaign and this one should be close.
NC Mike Easley (D)
Twice-defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate Richard Vinroot bowed out of the runoff between himself and state senator Patrick Ballantine that resulted from the recent primary. An independent poll last week had Easley starting with a 22 point advantage over Ballantine, who is little-known outside Wilmington. Easley has had a quiet first term and given the GOP little to hang on him. I'd be shocked if he didn't coast to a second term.
ND John Hoeven (R)
Governor Hoeven will be facing Joe Satrom, a former state senator, state director of the Nature Conservancy, and most recently director of conservation for Ducks Unlimited. The North Dakota Education Association, usually solidly Democratic, has endorsed Hoeven. This is the safest Republican seat in the list.
UT Olene Walker (R)
Walker replaced Mike Leavitt as governor when Bush tapped him to head the EPA. In the race to replace her, it's Mormon against Mormon. Democrat Scott Matheson, whose father was Utah's last Democratic governor twenty years ago, will face Jon Huntsman, Jr., a former ambassador to Singapore and son of the billionaire founder of Huntsman Chemical. Matheson's got the name, but being a Democrat in Utah is a lonely affair. A July 6-10 poll gave Huntsman a 51-38 lead with only 8% undecided. Bet on the big money.
VT Jim Douglas (R)
If any state should be ripe for a Democratic pickup, it's Vermont, but nobody underestimates Jim Douglas any longer. Douglas won the governorship in 2002 by a slim 45-43 margin with Con Hogan, a Republican who ran as an independent, pulling ten percent statewide. Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle is the Democratic nominee and the race is a toss-up.
WA Gary Locke (D)
With Gary Locke retiring at the end of this term, Attorney General Christine Gregoire is favored to beat the more left-leaning King County executive Ron Sims for the Democratic nomination and face Republican State Senator Dino Rossi. Gregoire has the money and momentum to become Washington's second female governor.
WV Bob Wise (D)
Wise, following damaging revelations he had an affair with a state employee, is not running for a second term. The race between Secretary of State Joe Manchin and businessman and Army veteran Monty Warner has been nasty already. Manchin, the Democrat, picked up the endorsement of the anti-abortion West Virginia for Life PAC and has forcefully supported a flag-burning amendment. Ugh. This one is difficult to handicap, but I expect a narrow Manchin win due to Warner's lack of political experience.
The red/blue split looks unlikely to show much movement this year. Dems could pick up one or two in Vermont, Montana, or New Hampshire, the Republicans in Indiana or Missouri. Only three come up next year - Hawaii, New Jersey, and Virginia. In 2006, however, 34 governor seats will be up for election, including seven where the incumbent is term limited, all Republicans (AR, CO, CT, FL, ID, NE, NV). That's when gains - one way or the other - are likely to be made.
(cross-posted at The American Street)
It's always darkest just before the dawn, ain't it, Randy?
Until last Saturday, 2004 had been the worst year of Randy Fletcher’s life. On a cold mid-January day, the 29 year old Brownstown resident took a half-day off of work due to a severe case of diarrhea, only to find his wife of four years, Tara, in bed with a neighbor. Two months later, he wrecked his mint-condition 1956 Chevy that he had spent three years carefully restoring when a deer ran out in front of him.
May brought even more heartache; Fletcher’s 12 year-old German Shepherd Molly was diagnosed with cancer and had to be put to sleep. Fletcher, who works as a union electrician, felt that his life was cursed after losing his house and most of his life savings in the divorce proceedings that were finalized on July 15.
That is until July 17, when his life changed forever. Fletcher purchased five dollars worth of Hoosier Lottery computer picks for that night’s drawing, like he had done every Wednesday and Saturday for the past several years. When he checked his ticket numbers against those in the Sunday Indianapolis Star, he had to do a double take [...] Randy Fletcher had just won the $1 million jackpot.
Two days after the divorce proceedings were finalized. I would be hard-pressed not to use some of that cash to put up a billboard in front of her house proclaiming in big block letters: I'M RRRRICH, BITCH!
Who knew radiators could be so swank? These are very cool, but they don't come cheap. At all.
Sigh.
New super-strength marijuana readily available on US streets is prompting the White House to change direction in its war against drugs. Research from the government-sponsored Marijuana Potency Project claims today's cannabis is more than twice as strong as in the mid-Eighties, leading to greater health risks for those smoking it at increasingly younger ages. Now President George Bush, who had already promised a more aggressive campaign against substance abuse, has ordered that resources be allocated to fighting so-called 'soft' drugs instead of concentrating on harder forms, such as heroin and cocaine.
Hands up: who thinks targetting marijuana is a better use of federal tax money than targetting hard drugs? And of the folks who have their hands up: how many of you have zero experience with either? Okay, you folks put your hands down and shut up. You haven't the first idea what you are talking about here.
Every few months, I read another story raising the alarum that today's marijuana is 6.2 billion times stronger than it was a couple of decades ago and is therefore a problem much more dire than, say, when the researchers were teenagers. Presumably, this is due to the increased risk of smokers' heads exploding Scanners-style. However, speaking as one who has some, er, experience in the field, this argument is nonsense. Most liquors are 10-15x more powerful than beer, but drinkers have managed to handle this tragic and confusing turn of events by not drinking 72 ounces of bourbon. Higher THC levels just mean smaller portion sizes, which mean less particulate-laden smoke, which means (look out) it's less bad for you.
"But these are teenagers we're talking about here and they won't know to stop!" Again, point missed. First, the super high-end stuff is waaaaay out of the price range of most teenagers. But that's really neither here nor there. You drink too much alcohol and you can easily land yourself in the hospital. What happens if you smoke too much marijuana? You stand a very real risk of eating all the food in your house and falling asleep on the couch in front of the Cartoon Network. I understand that given what we are discovering about brain development, it isn't a good thing for adolescents to smoke marijuana (kids: don't smoke pot...until college). But they will anyhow and no amount of government action is going to change that. You know it and I know it and the kids know it.
Look, for decades now we have approached drugs as a criminal problem and adopted essentially military means to deal with them. Drugs are not a criminal problem; they are a public health issue, and the way you deal with public health issues is harm reduction. Cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and the like are nasty, dangerous, highly addictive drugs that can flat-out wreck your life in short order. Marijuana, at its very worst, makes you lazy, absent-minded, and ambitionless. Those aren't particularly charming or useful traits to possess, I'll grant you, but the order of the priority list isn't even ambiguous here. Bush intends to pull money away from dealing with extremely dangerous drugs in order to focus on the one that has the lowest risk profile of all of them, including the legal ones.
I'm not arguing for legalization or decriminalization here (though I could), because that argument just gets lost in the fog of emotional responses. Even the most ardent anti-drug crusader should understand the issue here. Quite aside from the question of specific strategies, a finite amount of money exists to deal with the problems created by illicit drugs, therefore you focus the bulk of that money on the drugs producing the bulk of the problems. This is Management 101 stuff, folks. How our "CEO president" has managed to miss this most basic point is-- oh right, every business he ever ran failed. It's starting to make sense.
A series of anti-Bush concerts are being scheduled for this fall, according to music industry sources.
Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, R.E.M., Pearl Jam and a deep roster of other rock stars will unite for politically minded concerts this fall that will give voice to dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. The all-star rock shows, which are expected to begin in October and target campaign swing states, are in the planning stage but were confirmed by half a dozen music industry sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. [...] Other artists expected to join the lineup include Steve Earle, the Dave Matthews Band, the Dixie Chicks, Bright Eyes, Ani DiFranco, Death Cab for Cutie and International Noise Conspiracy. There also are reports that Bob Dylan and James Taylor may be part of the bill.
I expect this roster will continue to grow, though I don't expect any of these guys to sign up (the Daily Show's take on Michale Graves is here, and good for a chuckle). Turnout among young voters, traditionally quite low, could very well be the deciding factor in this election with so many states showing a contest within the margin of error. Getting them registered and keeping them energized is job number one. This should help.
How wacko do you have to get before even PETA will disavow you? This wacko.
To the fury of groups working with animals, Jerry Vlasak, a trauma surgeon and prominent figure in the anti-vivisection movement, told The Observer: "I think violence is part of the struggle against oppression. If something bad happens to these people [animal researchers], it will discourage others. It is inevitable that violence will be used in the struggle and that it will be effective."
Vlasak, who likens animal experimentation to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, said he stood by his claim that: "I don't think you'd have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives."
Well heck, as long as that's the math we're using, I think we'd only have to kill Jerry Vlasak to save a dozen or two scientists' lives. See where that kind of logic leads?
Blurbism is a collection of stunningly beautiful photographs of rusting boats, crumbling buildings, and the like. Compositions of decomposition, you could say.
One of the all-time greats died Thursday night, just six days after his last show at the Lincoln Center in New York. Illinois Jacquet popularized the style known as screeching, biting the reed to achieve high-register effects from a tenor sax. His solo on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" is considered the first R&B sax solo and a jazz classic. He was 19 when it was recorded. He was also the first jazz musician to be an artist-in-residence at Harvard. During Clinton's inaugural ball in 1993, Jacquet played "C-Jam Blues" with the president on the White House lawn. He had a hell of a career.
The search string "levitating fetus" doesn't have a single google hit (0 whG) to its credit, and that just doesn't seem right. In a couple of days, we'll have fixed that problem. Just so you know, "levitating fetus" will be the third googlorphan saved by the charity efforts of apostropher.com. We are still the sole providers of support for "bonobo rage" and "drive my mustard truck."
Also, googlorphan will join umpholks, capumphccino, calumphano, and jellumph locked down in the basement with the other mutants.
Update: I'm happy to report that as of June 14, 2005, of the three googlorphans listed above, only "drive my mustard truck" remains solely dependent on apostropher.com for support. Americans are a generous people.
In the beginning, there was Terry Teachout's Cultural Concurrence Index. And I looked upon the questions and I felt young and uncultured. Technically I scored 58%, but that was by virtue of invalidating a fair number of questions about which I either hadn't the slightest preference or the first clue. I can be as pompous as the next guy, but asked to choose between an Eamon chair and a Noguchi table, I can only reply with a blank stare. Amardeep Singh, having a similar experience with the TTCCI, came up with his own index which I found via Adam Kotsko. Closer, but in a sense the anti-TTCCI.
So, because I have the house to myself this weekend and nothing better to do, I present the Apostrophic Alignment Index. I started to build an index that would bridge the cultural gap between the two instruments but as with so much else I start, it just went completely tangential instead. Between the two of them, they had taken most of the good questions anyhow. Knock yourself out.
Bonus Round
Scoring
1. Treat all questions as "A or B" or no answer. Exclude bonus round.
2. (Number A answers)/(Number questions answered)
3. Three unanswered questions may be replaced with Bonus Round questions.
4. If you answered B for #7, subtract 20 points.
5. If you answered B for #49, subtract 15 points.
6. If you answered B for #9, subtract 10 points.
7. If you answered B for #37, subtract 5 points.
8. If you answered B for #6, warn me before you fix me a sandwich.
9. If you answered B for #28, go back and reread the question. That one was a gimme.
Your final score means absolutely nothing.
How much did they hate doing this?
Susan Kildow from Holly Springs NC wrote:
As young women who embody the future of our nation, how important do you believe character to be when choosing a candidate and how does your dad stack up?
Barbara and Jenna Bush answered:
Well, Susan, to us character is the most vital part of being an excellent leader. While we may be a little biased because he is our dad, we think - well, we KNOW -- that our Dad is a man of strong and principled character. If he says he is going to do something, he will do it. When we were kids, if dad said he was going to come to one of our soccer games, he would be there!
Edith Fuog from Miami FL wrote:
If you could only describe your father in one sentence, what would you say?
Barbara and Jenna Bush answered:
One sentence...Edith, that is a hard one! Okay: Our dad has given us an amazing life full of love and support and he lives his life respecting every individual he meets. Plus, he always keeps us and our Mom laughing. Oops! That's two sentences...sorry!
"we love our Dad so much [...] our father is the perfect person to be the President [...] We know he is the perfect person for the Presidency [...] we couldn't have been prouder of our father [...] We also love newer musicians like Modest Mouse, The Strokes and Postal Service [...] one thing that we love about him is his open-mindedness [...] watching so many people yell and chant for my father, I could not help but get tears in my eyes [...] so many people that respect and love my dad almost as much as I do [...] I love the amazing tapas and beautiful flamenco music [...] Well, looks like our time is up! We really appreciate everyone joining us online today! Don't forget to vote for our Dad in November!
Quoth Wonkette: "Their responses were an insult to Stepford Wives, but then again, the questions were an insult to our intelligence."
By some strange stroke of conceptual continuity, within a half hour of me posting yesterday about food prepared with urine, Steve Verdon accused me of gulping down "bile with relish," and opined that "it is rather sad, as I have enjoyed some discussion here with apostropher." As for the relish, I make no apologies. That stuff is delicious. I really only put it on dogs and sausages, though. I don't much care even for eggplant, so as you can imagine, bile is just straight out. But a spin through his archives will demonstrate that Steve knows from bilious, so I'll take his word that it's a winning combination. Oh, and I'm sorry I made you sad, Steve. If it will cheer you up any, that really wasn't my primary motivation.
Oh my god. Eunoia, meaning beautiful thinking and the shortest word in English that uses all five vowels, is also a book of prose poetry by Canadian author Christian Bök. The 112-page volume took him "seven years of daily persistence" to finish. Why so long?
[Eunoia consists] of five chapters, each chapter of which contains words that use only the letter A, say, or E, I, O, or U. (There is no Chapter Y; elsewhere in this collection, outside of the title work, Bök recognizes Y as a consonant. Within Eunoia, however, he avoids the use of Y entirely.) If that weren’t enough, Bök also imposes other parameters on himself:
"All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire. . . . The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once)."
Among the myriad challenges here, no e means most past tense verbs are out and no y just about eliminates adverbs. How well does such an exercise stand as literature? Well, the full text is available here. Here's how the I chapter begins:
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight.
I came across this amazing find via Jaybo at metafilter, who also gives links to mp3 files of the entire book and then some. And really, you have to hear it to fully appreciate it. Really.
Hmm, apparently alcohol does impair your judgment after all.
A 31-year-old man who had just woken up from a drunken stupor after falling asleep overnight in a zoo in Estonia tried to offer a polar bear a biscuit - and had his hand bitten off. His screams drew security personnel, who promptly called an ambulance which took the man to hospital in the capital, Tallinn, the Baltic News Service reported.
The unidentified man had passed out after consuming large amounts of alcohol with friends. He woke up in the early hours of Thursday, found the biscuit in his pocket offered it to the bear. Tallinn Zoo manager Mati Kaal, who has worked more than 30 years at the zoo, told BNS that it was the 11th time he had heard of such accidents, although "this is the first hand. In other cases it's been the whole arm."
The eleventh time? Maybe they should put up a sign or something.
Tired of hanging around with all of your friends who used to be cool and popular but now are just insufferably lame and refuse to go away? Well, you're probably stuck with them, so quit bitching about it. But if you'd like something to make it seem less dreary by comparison, why not get away from it all with a seven-day Carnival cruise through the western Caribbean with Journey, REO Speedwagon, and Styx? All aboard the SS Good-God-Whose-Horrible-Idea-Was-This!
"And I can't fight this feeling anymore
Even dramamine won't help keep down the gorge
It's time to bring this ship into the shore
Pop my eardrums with a fork or whatever..."
The world's smallest, lightest vertebrate is the stout infantfish, about as long as a pencil is wide and half the size of the world's smallest lizard. The first stout infantfish specimen was caught in 1979 but has only just now been analyzed in detail. You would need to collect roughly 500,000 of these little guys to reach one pound, which makes them a poor food source, even for Mr. Peebles, the world's smallest cat.
NASA has released a remarkable natural color image of Saturn's rings taken by Cassini on June 21, nine days and four million miles before entering orbit.
Join the Army! Travel to exotic lands, meet exciting people, and get a bitchin' new rack.
The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the U.S. military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free -- something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.
"Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Dr. Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine, which said soldiers needed the approval of their commanding officers to get the time off. Between 2000 and 2003, military doctors performed 496 breast enlargements and 1,361 liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents, the magazine said.
Uh, no thanks.
Would you eat food cooked in your own urine? Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it. The ration comes in a pouch containing a filter that removes 99.9 per cent of bacteria and most toxic chemicals from the water used to rehydrate it, according to the Combat Feeding Directorate, part of the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts. This is the same organisation that created the "indestructible sandwich" that will stay fresh for three years.
I don't think this will help recruitment rates.
And they shall grow up to be like me.
Some premature babies need caffeine in order to breathe properly. Conversely, when I can't get caffeine, I curl into a fetal position and cry.
Back in March, I linked to an article about Oliver, the now-elderly chimp who walks erect and convinced some that he was a "missing link" between chimps and humans (he isn't). This month, Oliver suddenly got a colleague in Israel.
Two weeks ago, Natasha [a five-year-old black macaque] and three other monkeys were diagnosed with severe stomach flu. At the zoo clinic, she slipped into critical condition, said Igal Horowitz, the veterinarian.
"I was sure that she was going to die," he said. "She could hardly breathe and her heart was not functioning properly." After intensive treatment, Natasha's condition stabilized. When she was released from the clinic, Natasha began walking upright.
"I've never seen or heard of this before," said Horowitz. One possible explanation is brain damage from the illness, he said. Otherwise, Horowitz said, Natasha's behavior has returned to normal.
The link has a picture of Natasha perambulating. Perhaps we're all just brain damaged monkeys.
"HR had to have a conversation with this woman and say, 'You cannot spray Lysol at this person.' "
And if you play his speeches backwards, you get Satanic messages.
According to anagramgenius.com, the letters in "John Kerry" can also be used to spell "horny jerk."
Other political figures don't make out so well in the all-important anagram battle. For instance, anagrams for George W. Bush include, "He grew bogus" and "Ugh! Sewer bog."
-- The letters in "Vice President Dick Cheney" can also be arranged as, "Prick's ethic: Deny Evidence."
-- John Edwards can be spelled as "John's red wad" or "Drew John's ad."
-- Finally, when the letters in the sentence,"Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California," are switched around, it says, "Sigh. An overgrown nerd in charge of a zoo after recall."
That's pretty good, but five points were deducted for referring to a phrase as a sentence. An additional one point penalty was assessed for not mentioning my all-time favorite political anagram (and yes, I'm just that big of a geek that I have one): Ronald Wilson Reagan = Insane Anglo Warlord.
According to the Internet Anagram Server, apostropher yields many gems, including poop trasher, a proper host, part prose ho, a rhetor pops, a posh report, proto-seraph, torpor heaps, roast hopper, rapport hose, hat proposer, rappers hoot, poorer paths, pope or trash, pooh parters, props are hot, proper oaths, repost oprah, and retro sappho.
Andy Katz's preseason NCAA basketball national rankings:
1. Wake Forest
2. North Carolina
Booyakasha! Duke also pops in at #10 ("The Blue Devils are probably the least deserving of a top 10 ranking." Isn't that, by definition, always the case for the tenth pick?), and NC State at #26. Winter can't get to Tobacco Road soon enough. Heels, baby. Heels.
No doubt inspired by Froz's post on the subject, the Onion hits the street to ask "What do you think about the threatened extinction of chimpanzees?"
The New Yorker recounts the parts of the Cheney-Leahy smackdown the papers didn't print.
As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate's public-address system and cued up the infamous "Seven Minutes of Funk" break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a "take no prisoners" freestyle rap battle. Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases "unethical for certain," "crude oil spurtin'," and "like Halliburton." Despite the fact that both participants brought their A-game and succeeded in dropping mad scientifics, the bout seemed to end in a draw.
Read the rest. You'll be glad you did. (via Mr. Saturday)
The Mars Rovers have trundled across the Red Planet's surface, drilled into some rocks, and dug shallow trenches with their wheels. With nearly every step, new surprises have been uncovered, and they are still soldiering along, well past the expected mission end date, as the Martian winter approaches. However, given the chilly surface temperatures and high radiation levels, the most likely way to find current life or evidence of past life is by digging into the subsurface. The ESA Beagle craft was equipped with some digging capabilities, but it didn't survive the landing (or so the Greys would have you believe). NASA is now developing an instrument for future missions that would be able to drill five meters (16.4 feet) beneath the surface.
The Mole is shaped like an artillery shell. An internal sliding weight will drive the Mole into the soil. Once dug in, the Mole will connect by a tether to an apparatus on the surface. The tether will include power wires and a fiber optic cable that will transport light collected underground to a spectrometer [Digital Array Scanning Interferometer] on the surface above. [...] Because the DASI operates with fixed optics and no moving parts, it also is very stable under severe conditions. The entire Mole will weigh only about 2.2 pounds (1 kg) and be about 20 inches (50 cm) long.
NASA has an artist's animation of how the instrument would work. They will test it in dry lakebeds in the California desert, then probably in permafrost conditions in Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Canada.
...that he probably can't remember.
Michael Monn's [23rd] birthday celebration went a little awry when he was arrested while drunk, nude and covered with nacho cheese. Monn was detained early Sunday as he ran toward a Jeep in the parking lot outside a swimming pool snack bar. According to police, he was stark naked and was carrying a box of Frito Lay snacks and a container of nacho cheese. "The male had nacho cheese in his hair, on his face and on his shoulders," Maryville Police Department officer Scott Spicer said. "The nude male had a strong odor of alcohol and was semi-incoherent."
Better nacho cheese than bean dip, I guess. Do I even need to mention that this took place in the South?
(Cross-posted at The American Street)
Wander around this site for any length of time and you'll know I'm mostly in this for my own amusement. More than anything, I like to laugh and I don't hold much truck with sacred cows. They all look like steak. Do I laugh more at Republicans? Well, sure. They're funnier because they just believe the damnedest things. Last week, though, each side's Ministry of Virtue was at Red Alert.
Republicans were awarded the merit badge for manufactured outrage after seldom-funny comedienne Whoopi Goldberg made an off-color joke about the double entendre inherent in the president's name. Set aside for a moment the fact that every single person you know and every single person they know had already heard some tired variant of it. In the 80s. The gist of the gnashing of teeth was that somebody had made a dirty joke involving the president in a political setting. Can't imagine when that would have happened previously, aside from every minute of every day from 1993 to 2001.
On the other side, hackles were raised after Arnold Schwarzenegger referred to his legislative opponents as "girly-men." Straightaway began the hue and cry of homophobia. But let's be honest: if Arnie was a Democrat, you know what we would all be saying. It's a line from a Saturday Night Live skit that makes fun of . . . Schwarzenegger. He's poking fun at himself, the same way he does when he drops conspicuously corny movie catchphrases into speeches. Interpreting the latest remark as homophobic rather than clumsy joking misses the mark here.
Humor is a powerful political weapon when it is wielded with skill. The biggest knock on Al Gore's 2000 campaign, that he was wooden or stodgy, could just as well be recast as humorless. Gore cracked jokes about his inability to crack jokes. Points awarded for being meta, I suppose, but it wasn't ever funny. Following Clinton, who had excellent timing and was quick enough on his feet to wing it, Gore suffered badly by comparison. Bush does adequately reading jokes, employing an understated delivery that fits the material he's handed, but his off-the-cuff humor shows a streak of gratuitous meanness that isn't nearly as endearing as his tongue-tied bumpkin schtick. Case in point: Karla Faye Tucker.
Kerry, of course, doesn't peg very high on the laughmeter. "And I say to you now: take my wife Teresa . . . please." The most wince-inducing example so far was during his interview with Tim Russert, which included video of Kerry's 1971 testimony before Congress followed by an exquisitely awkward exchange:
LT. KERRY: [video] There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals. [End video]
MR. RUSSERT: You committed atrocities.
SEN. KERRY: Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me. [laughs]
Uh, you may want to work on your timing, Senator. Your segues are a little jarring.
The good news is that vice presidential candidates have often provided humor. The bad news is that they have not often done it intentionally (coughQuaylecough). John Edwards has been okay, announcing his candidacy on The Daily Show, and he's decent in the late-night milieu ("Lady, that is one ugly baby."). I suspect he could be funnier if it didn't undercut the whole earnest thing he's working. Still, I'll bet he's funnier drunk than Bush is. Aaaand then there's Cheney, hunched in the corner, snarling and taking names. A laugh riot, that guy is.
All in all, we're staring at the prospect of a profoundly unfunny campaign, due not just to the personalities in the mix, but also the dangerously high stakes involved. The Bush Administration has proven to be wildly divisive, and tempers on each side are short all over the country. Roll your eyes, groan, shake your head, but take a joke. You'll feel much better afterwards, I promise.
I'll end with one you've probably heard, but one that sums up the Bush presidency as well as anything else I've read.
A 70-year-old Texas rancher got his hand caught in a gate while working cattle. He wrapped the hand in his bandana and drove his pickup to the doctor. While suturing the laceration, the doctor asked the old man about George W. Bush being in the White House.
The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a Post Turtle."
Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked what a Post Turtle was.
The old man looked at him and drawled, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a Post Turtle."
The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he explained, "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he can't get anything done while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor dumb bastard get down."
A: We are Devo!
"The future of packaging is looking both earth-friendly and user-friendly. Packages shaped like tank tops and boxer shorts leave little chance that the shopper will pick up the wrong item. Once home, the entire package goes right in the wash, thanks to a packaging material composed of dissolvable cornstarch and a small amount of detergent."
Expected target audience: Mongoloids and Jocko Homo.
Being a crusty old contrarian, I have previously bemoaned - and will surely bemoan in the future - the internet's role in enabling ever more egregious spelling and grammar errors in ever greater quantities. "Pah!" cries the loyal opposition. "Languages evolve and you are merely wallowing in neo-Luddism with your bourgeois, pre-internet, crypto-fascist, prescriptive rules of English. its ok as long as people understand you...and like, not capitilizeing and shit...and useing lots and lots of these dot things...why do you care anyway?!?!? LOL!!!"
"Don't you 'Pah' me, whippersnappers," I retort. "That shit ain't evolution, it's laziness and those dots are ellipses, by the way." Well, the conversation has never actually gone quite like that, but the general sentiment is there. Why does it bug me so? Heck, I don't know. It just does and fiercely so. Happily, though, it isn't just me.
The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational." Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.
It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I felt it necessary to make one small punctuation revision to that passage. Anyhow, nine months have passed since I listed my original Ten Grammandments, and every reader should appreciate the restraint I have exhibited in the interim, particularly since spambots began sending purposefully misspelled messages to evade my Bayesian filter, driving linguistic bamboo shoots into my cerebral cortex. A lesser apostropher would have been perched on a belltower with a rifle months ago. I still haven't taken the thing out of its box yet, but one more ho!t sitcky tean hore in my inbox and all bets are off.
Accordingly, in order to release a little pressure and spare innocent bystanders, allow me to add just two short items to the list:
11. Separate: s-e-p-a-r-a-t-e. Desperate: d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-e. See the difference?
12. When you are nauseated, you are sick to your stomach. When you are nauseous, you are making other people sick to their stomachs.*
[heavy sigh] Alright, I'm probably good through the end of the year now.
*Yes, yes, I know some guides and dictionaries have abdicated their duties and declared the sickened nauseous to be on equal footing with the sickening nauseous because the former usage is now far more common than the latter. Well, you know what I say to that: Pah! People with lice used to be far more common than people without, and we didn't just go traipsing about declaring that state of affairs peachy.
Update (7:34 am): I can't believe I didn't make this a part of Grammandment 11. In the comments, wasmyth points out another one that probably exceeds both separate and desperate. "Definitely" comes from the same Latin root as "finite," so please, people, no instances of the letter a anywhere in that word, even if your name is Nate.
Matthew at Defective Yeti explains the Hello My Name Is __________ sticker on the Pioneer 10 probe's lapel, as only he could. Priceless.
Alternatively, the plaque's designer, the late Carl Sagan, discusses its significance in this 5.7MB Quicktime clip.
At McSweeney's, Ed Page suggests:
I'd add:
Via Daniel Drezner, dig the new sculpture crowning the entry to SBC Plaza in Chicago's Millenium Park.
The sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly-polished stainless steel "plates" that create an elliptically-arched, highly reflective work with Chicago’s skyline and Millennium Park itself as a dramatic backdrop. Visitors will be able to fully experience the majestic nature of the work by literally walking through and around, as it was designed for public interaction. Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest in the world, measuring 66-feet long by 33-feet high.
Anish Kapoor revealed his chosen title for the elliptical stainless steel sculpture – Cloud Gate. As is his custom, Kapoor waited until the sculpture was fully assembled to reveal its name. Now on view, the polishing of Cloud Gate will be complete by the fall. The sculpture is made possible by a gift from the SBC Corporation.
I want one.
Assault with a deadly reptile.
A man hit his girlfriend with a 3-foot alligator and threw beer bottles at her during an argument in the couple's mobile home, authorities said. David Havenner, 41, was ordered held without bond Saturday on misdemeanor charges of battery and possession of an alligator. The alligator, which Havenner had been keeping in his bathtub, was turned over to Florida wildlife officials. [...] Havenner's version of the story differed. He told investigators that Monico bit his hand because she was upset that they had run out of alcohol.
My money is on both stories being true.
Bush then: "I hope I'm viewed as a humble person."
Bush now: "I trust God speaks through me."
Go ahead and have a chuckle at The W Deck. Obligatory work warning: a couple of the cards have exposed nipples. Every card, however, features a boob.
(via CSOTD)
Straight guys, no matter how hip and tolerant you are, you know this amusing article about the obligatory "I'm straight" signal is pretty much on the money. Especially this part:
This brings us to the really curious thing about the Straight Sign. It is more readily thrown at a guy who gives every appearance of actually being straight.
When we wind up in conversation with a man who is doubtlessly gay; who is making a calculated risk by trying to flirt with us; whose eyes are gently alight with the unmistakable mist of furtiveness and desire that we probably emit when we try to chat up attractive women; when there is not a shred of ambiguity in the air as to the orientation of the guy you're talking to; then the Straight Sign can be postponed for a decent interval. Why ruin a good conversation? Why act like some paranoid bumpkin who can't deal with gay people? We Blue State urban males are more enlightened than that, more accepting, aren't we? We're hip. We have plenty of gay friends.
But here's the thing we really don't like to talk about. Deep within the reptilian cortex of even the most Eberhard-Faber straight man on the planet -- who among us does not get a small ego-boost from being the quarry? Somebody found us attractive. It might be somebody who hasn't a chance in hell of getting into our pants, but we're a little flattered by the attention. [...] We may even be thinking too much of ourselves, that a self-respecting gay man would even want to try and get a slob like us in the sack.
Yeah, we may be (and usually are), but don't burst our bubbles, okay? Just humor us.
I know a doctor who needs anger management courses.
A Romanian surgeon has been suspended after allegedly cutting a patient's penis into several pieces. He was operating on a man to lower a testicle into his scrotum when he accidentally cut the urinary channel. It's reported the surgeon then lost his temper and cut the man's penis into several pieces. The surgeon, Naum Ciomu, is a senior member of the hospital staff and a professor of anatomy. He has been suspended for six months and faces further investigations.
Lost his temper? Lost his temper? Don't cut him off in traffic, folks. He makes this guy sound like Jonas Salk. A team of doctors tried to salvage the 34-year-old patient's urinary function, but were unsuccessful. They will try to reconstruct the organ in a few months.
A team of scientists studying plate tectonics has observed a previously unknown phenomenon off the Northwest Pacific coast. The Juan de Fuca plate is slowly sliding underneath the North American plate, "creating cracks and fissures, hydrothermal vents, seafloor spreading, and literally hundreds of small earthquakes on a near-daily basis." Normally, this process involves either lava ejection through cracks or hot liquid ejection from vents, but in this case, it's sucking the water down into the seafloor rather than pushing molten rock out across it.
Dziak said the researchers think the seafloor spreading caused the ocean crust to dilate, increasing the pore space much like a sponge. "It's like an anti-plume," he said. "Instead of sending materials from within the Earth to the ocean floor, it simply sucks down the surrounding seawater."
The researchers aren't sure exactly what causes the dilation, but it has multiple implications. First, it changes how scientists view seafloor spreading since there isn't an automatic outpouring of lava, or hot liquid via hydrothermal vents previously associated with tectonic plate theory. The size of these potential "voids" also intrigues scientists, who wonder how much seawater can be subsumed. If large, or frequent, they could affect surrounding water temperatures and chemical composition, Dziak said.
Finally, water migrating downward through the Earth may be enough to trigger the growth of bacteria at startling depths. Last year, in an unrelated study, OSU oceanographer Martin Fisk and a team of researchers found bacteria in a hole drilled 4,000 feet through volcanic rock. Basalt rocks have all of the elements required for life, Fisk pointed out, including carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen. Only water is needed to complete the formula.
And it's pretty rumbly down there, too.
During the past dozen years, Dziak and his research team have recorded more than 30,000 earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean off the Northwest coast – few of which have ever shown up on land-based seismic equipment. [...] The number of earthquakes offshore initially stunned researchers because they weren't being detected on land – even by the most sensitive seismometers. The scientists also discovered that these quakes occurred daily, but every so often there would be a "swarm" of as many as a thousand quakes in a three-week period.
"In the last 10 years, I've seen seven of these swarms," Dziak said. "The plate doesn't move in a continuous manner and some parts move faster than others. Every four years or so, a section of the Juan de Fuca Ridge exhibits a large earthquake swarm and lava breaks through onto the seafloor. Usually, the plate moves at about the rate a fingernail might grow – say three centimeters a year. But when these swarms take place, the movement may be more like a meter in a two-week period."
Dziak tracks these quakes through an array of undersea hydrophones through an arrangement with the US Navy. Originally, the equipment was used to track Soviet submarines during the Cold War. Now that we don't so much worry about that sort of thing, the Navy is allowing environmental researchers to use SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) instead. Nifty, huh?
London's Science Museum is successful enough that they don't have to take shit from anybody. But they might, all the same.
The central London museum said it was considering taking the waste from its 14 toilet blocks and converting it into electricity. [...] The museum said the plan would be to siphon off waste from the toilets, store it and then either burn it as fuel in a mini-power station or turn it into electricity using a microbial fuel cell. The power produced from the excrement of 100,000 visitors could produce enough to power 500 light bulbs, while also breaking down harmful organic matter, it said.
With nearly 3 million visitors a year, that's about 15,000 lightbulbs worth of electricity. More, if they put a Burger King stand in the lobby. In light of this, the Guardian's Yee Shun Fung lists ten usages for feces, including as frisbees and for smoking cheese.
The Illinois Republican Party just can't get a date to the prom. After Jack Ryan withdrew following lurid sex club allegations from his divorce, they went for former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. What are his qualifications for the US Senate? Hell if I know, but I guess if Jesse "The Body" Ventura can be governor of Minnesota, anything's possible. Well, Ditka decided against the run, and now a new name is being floated.
Republican sources say that the Republican Party will now focus on two potential candidates: Jim Oberwies, who finished second in the primary for this nomination, and John Cox, who ran a couple of years ago. Both have the distinction of being multimillionaires. But another name surfacing is that of rocker, outspoken conservative and gun rights activist Ted Nugent.
"He grew up in Arlington Heights. He went to St. Viator High School," said Cook County Republican Chair Gary Skoien. "He has more connection to Illinois than Hillary Clinton had to New York, and he's been a very articulate spokesperson on constitutional issues. He would be a very interesting candidate."
Nugent couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday night.
Zee wango, zee tango, zee Senator Barack Obama.
A new WRAL/Mason-Dixon Poll has North Carolina 48-45 for Bush, a statistical tie. No methodology or MoE are listed, though the internals are here.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll from a few days ago put the Bush lead among registered NC voters at 49-43, and among likely voters at a whopping 54-39.
Interesting side item: in the Mason-Dixon poll, Kerry is leading in the Raleigh-Durham area by an impressive 20 points (I live in Durham, btw), but trailing everywhere else. Taking the M-D numbers at face value for a moment, a statewide 3% gap with 7% undecided - before the convention - would be a fantastic starting position. Then again, the other poll is harsh, harsh, harsh. We'll be seeing lots and lots of polls of NC voters in the coming months, so we'll see who is the outlier.
If you go to KerryEdwards.com to get information on the Democratic ticket, you'll be disappointed, even though that is a very cute kid.
The 34-year-old part-time bail bondsman registered the website KerryEdwards.com in early 2002 so he and his family could use it for photos and other personal information. Little did he know that the website would be in heavy demand following presidential candidate John Kerry's announcement of John Edwards as his running mate.
Mr. Kerry Edwards estimates he's received more than 90 offers to buy the website domain, including one for $150,000. But when the Kerry campaign called asking him to donate or sell the site, they weren't willing to pay even five figures for it. The Indianapolis Edwards is now looking for a professional domain broker to help him negotiate a deal, but he hopes the site eventually falls into the hands of the Kerry campaign so it can't be used against the Democratic ticket.
150K. That's a lot of cheese to turn down. I would have jumped all over that, even if it was Karl Rove himself calling about it.
A man is recovering from burns after lighting a cigarette in a portable outhouse in Monongalia County, West Virginia, causing the outhouse to explode. The incident occurred Tuesday morning in Blacksville, West Virginia. The man's name and condition aren't being released, but emergency officials say he wasn't severely hurt and even drove himself to a clinic. A spokeswoman for Monongalia Emergency Medical Services said the explosion was caused because there was a build-up of methane gases inside the outhouse. She said the methane didn't "take too kindly" to the lit cigarette.
Stephen Hawking says he was wrong and he plans to prove it.
It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost. But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.
[...]
Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.
"He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."
The conference starts this Sunday. Until then, you'll just have to make do with his dope rhymes.
Well, cloudmaker, really; but I couldn't think of a good reference from popular culture.
The (NASA-funded, UC-Santa Barbara and Woods-Hole) study finds that in summer when the Sun beats down on the top layer of ocean where plankton live, harmful rays in the form of ultraviolet (UV) radiation bother the little plants. When they are bothered, or stressed, plankton try to protect themselves by producing a compound called dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP). Though no one knows for sure, some scientists believe DMSP helps strengthen the plankton's cell walls. This chemical gets broken down in the water by bacteria, and it changes into another substance called dimethylsulfide (DMS).
DMS then filters from the ocean into the air, where it reacts with oxygen, to form different sulfur compounds. Sulfur in the DMS sticks together in the air and creates tiny dust-like particles. These particles are just the right size for water to condense on, which is the beginning of how clouds are formed. So, indirectly, plankton help create more clouds, and more clouds mean less direct light reaches the ocean surface. This relieves the stress put on plankton by the Sun's harmful UV rays.
Kinda like putting on sunscreen. We do that, too; albeit with a little different process.
Let's see... The feedback loop goes something like this:
Widen the roads to accommodate traffic;
Stimulate sprawl along those roads;
Traffic increases to fill them;
Sow, reap, repeat...
So why then make funding of public transportation so much more difficult for communities?
Currently, when the federal government approves any new transportation project, whether it's a road or transit project, it is supposed to pay for 80 percent of the cost and the state or local community pays 20 percent. The Bush administration has proposed to maintain this 80:20 ratio for roads, while dramatically changing it to 50:50 for transit projects.
Like Roman aqueducts and Egyptian pyramids, years from now archaeologists will marvel at our highway system. The elaborate freeway interchanges visible in just about every American city will be reminders of amazing engineering skill and enormous effort.
But a society's physical infrastructure doesn't just respond to current needs; it heavily influences future needs depending on the manner in which it is built. What the current addiction to sprawl does is commit future generations of North American inhabitants to an economy that loses a disproportionally (and unnecessarily) high percentage of its productive potential to transportation energy costs.
The predictable argument that the 50-50 split will "extend the federal dollars" is baloney. Communities aren't in a position to pick up more of the bill for what has (at long last) become something the feds help out with. And if that up-is-down canard works for trains, why not roads, too?
The 50-50 split isn't unjust inandofitself. And I'm all for lowering the political center of gravity; maybe transportation infrastructrure is better funded at a more local level. But when it intentionally creates a disadvantage for public transportation - an extremely vital tool for weaning ourselves off oil, middle eastern or otherwise - I'm just dumbfounded.
Guns don't blow off their own testicles, people blow off their own testicles. Then they go to jail.
A British man who accidentally shot himself in the testicles after drinking 15 pints of beer was jailed for five years on Tuesday for possessing an illegal firearm, a court spokesman said. David Walker, 28, was arguing with a friend at a pub in South Yorkshire, northern England, when he went home to get his sawed-off shotgun, which he jammed into his trousers. But as he walked back to the pub, the gun went off, blasting pellets into his testicles. Doctors later removed what remained of his testicles during emergency surgery.
I'll bet he's the most bitter fellow in all of England right now.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for your Carrboro Fightin' Commies!
(Bum ba-da-da bum bum)
"Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want ..."
Kevin Hayden, the head honcho over at the group blog called The American Street, e-mailed me last week to ask if I'd consider doing a weekly post there. I couldn't have been more flattered, as some of that crew were among the very first bloggers I ever read. I'm scheduled to regularly cast my pearls Tuesday mornings, though I'll probably post some random others now and again when the mood hits me and it seems germane.
Anyhow, my TAS debut is up - a long, rambling post about NC's new battleground state possibilities, made longer and more rambling due to writing it between midnight and 3 am of the day it was due. So little has changed in the 12 years since college...
Ananova reports that "twenty-eight people have been treated for burns during a fire-walking event in New Zealand."
I'm concerned about al-Qaeda blowing something up here in the States right before election day. I'm also concerned about the far more likely scenario that some ambitious teenager or closet sociopath blows something up right before election day because everybody will immediately assume it was al Qaeda and they'll get a good chuckle.
So would we postpone elections? I certainly hope not, even if the attack is in an urban, and thus likely "Blue" area, depressing democratic turnout. But my panties, if I were wearing any right now, wouldn't get particularly wadded up about the US Election Assistance Commission keeping all options on the table during discussions of what to do in a worst case scenario.
But I know how we can avoid this whole thing and really pull one over on those nasty terrorists, to boot. Remember when Jerry, sneaky fella that he is, surprised everybody and brought in relief pitcher Iyad Allawi 2 innings early? Man, nobody saw it coming. I grinned for 48 hours imagining Zarqawi trying to catch bin Laden on his cell phone for an orders update.
So here's my plan: We'll have to be REAL quiet about it, but I'm sure we can pull it off. We hold elections on Sunday, October 31, two days early, BUT DON"T TELL ANYBODY ELSE what we're doing. Especially France.
My wife planned a surprise birthday party for me when I turned 30. I'll bet she'd be willing to help coordinate. It was great. I had no idea what was happening. And it's not so easy to get one by ol' Froz, if you know what I mean. I'll ask her.
It'll be great! Imagine the headlines on Al-Jazeera and le Monde. "America lies about its election day; Israel thought to be behind it." And "Americans keeping le secrets; President Chirac disappointed, but not surprised." You have to say that last bit with a really strong French accent to get the full effect. Go on. Try it.
I thought briefly that Halloween might be bad because of all the other festivities. But after going over the details, it's perfect. Everybody just needs to update their voter registration with what costume their planning to wear. Come Electioween (How 'bout that name, eh - you can use it for free but you gotta give me credit) anybody who tries to vote for you won't know your character! We're going to take a big bite out of election fraud this way, too.
And how 'bout this - Kerry and Bush can dress up as each other. Boy, that'd be wild. Can you picture a recount with each candidate pretending that they're the other, but then they're just playing the other, but then they're really themselves just pretending to be playing the other. Think you're confused? Just imagine what Osama's thinking. Ha Ha. Sucker.
...to a perfect world. From the press release:
The new UMPH(TM) effervescent energy tablets dissolve in any cold beverage (fruit juice, sports drinks, iced teas, sodas-whatever you prefer) to create an instant energy drink in your favorite flavor. And because UMPH(TM) is compact and light, it's a perfect choice for business travelers. Wherever you carry a briefcase or purse, you can easily carry UMPH(TM). But, best of all, you'll always know how UMPH(TM) will affect you-no matter your beverage choice. UMPH(TM) contains about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee.
Awww yeah. Now we're talking. I went to their website, and noticed they had a link for recipes. Turns out there's really only one recipe, a four-step numbered process for dropping a dissolving tablet into a cold drink ("Any cold drink will do!"), though the last two steps are wait for 90 seconds and drink it. They do helpfully note that you could, alternatively, drop the tablet into an empty glass and then pour the cold drink over it. That's, like, for weekends or something. I suspect you could also chew the thing up and then wash it down with a cold drink - any cold drink will do - but I doubt it would be entirely pleasant.
Anyhow, they only have the one recipe, but the UMPHolks do list several potential cold drinks - the cold drink being half the ingredients in the recipe - just in case you're not really an idea person. The non-alcoholic list ends with the oddly specific "16 oz bottled water (if you like water with lemon)." The mixed drink list is headed by the suggestion to "add some UMPH™ to your happy hour" and includes UMPHtinis. While caffeinated martinis strike me as a particularly noble and beautiful concept, the word Umphtinis looks like something you'd catch from a bus station toilet seat. On the other hand, they don't have the otherwise ubiquitous trademark sign following it, so you may still be able to secure the intellectual property rights if you get cracking.
The recipe page also provides a link for consumers to submit their own UMPH™ recipes. I'm working on the double capUMPHccino, deep fried UMPH puppies, and a pudding.
I'm guessing these folks didn't find what they were looking for. I'm a little surprised to be the first hit on that one.
Raised by monkeys, I could see. Wolves, even. But chickens?
Social workers in Fiji are trying to rehabilitate a 32-year-old man they say was raised by chickens, according to NBC. As a young child, the man was locked in a chicken coop for several years by his grandfather after his parents died. He had little contact with humans and picked up the habits of the birds.
After escaping from the coop, the man was taken to a local hospital. No one knew how to treat him, so hospital workers locked him in a room and tied him to his bed for more than 20 years. Now, doctors are trying to treat the man. They say he has no mental defects and agree his condition is from years of abuse and neglect.
"He had imitated or imprinted with the chicken," said Elizabeth Clayton who is rehabilitating the man. "He was perching, he was picking at his food, he was hopping around like a chicken. He'd keep his hands in a chicken-like fashion, and he'd make a noise which was like the calling of a chicken -- which he still has." Doctors said the man has made remarkable progress and is now learning to walk and speak like a human.
The link has video from the TV news report.
Wait! Maybe they're buried under the rosebush... in Baghdad.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - Two items containing classified information are missing from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a lab spokesman said Friday. The items - so-called "Classified Removable Electronic Media" - were discovered missing from the Weapons Physics Directorate during an inventory check Wednesday, lab spokesman Kevin Roark said.
So would these be documentation-of-weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-activities?
Brain implants have been used to "read the minds" of monkeys to predict what they are about to do and even how enthusiastic they are about doing it. It is the first time such high level cognitive brain signals have been decoded and could ultimately lead to more natural thought-activated prosthetic devices for people with paralysis(.)
[...]The new findings could in theory make this simpler by allowing, say, a paralysed patient to merely specify which object to reach for, and let the robot worry about how it gets there. The monkeys were trained to think about a particular point in their visual field before reaching for it while the researchers recorded signals in an area Andersen calls the "reach region".
Monkeys, thought-activated robots, hmmm. Something tells me we might regret this one day.
Via Ampersand, here's another cool, vaguely creepy timewaster, kinda like Hospital Apoka, but with a touch of humor.
More than 30 endangered brown pelicans have crashed onto sidewalks and roads in Arizona, mistaking the heat-induced shimmer of the paved surface for lakes and creeks.
"They try to land on the water, but it's asphalt and it's 'Bam! That doesn't feel so good,'" said Sandy Cate, director of the Arizona Game and Fish Department's wildlife center at Adobe Mountain in north Phoenix.
During the past two weeks, the injured pelicans have been found from Yuma to Phoenix, the department said Thursday. The pelicans have been treated mostly for dehydration and emaciation. Wildlife experts believe the endangered birds are experiencing a food shortage along the West Coast and are heading to Arizona to find fish. The sun's reflection, mixed with hot and cool layers of air create mirages, and the birds mistake smooth pavements for water.
Whenever I'm at the coast, I'm always strangely fascinated by the pelicans diving headfirst, not quite gracefully but with a whopping lot of momentum, into the ocean. I'll bet seeing one dive headfirst into a sidewalk is even more impressive.
Day 1: No gorings.
Day 2: No gorings.
Day 3: JACKPOT!
Four people, including one American, were gored by bulls on the streets of Pamplona Friday, the third day of the northern Spanish city's world famous fiesta. [...] Those gored were identified as a 22-year-old American man from Louisiana with a knee wound, a British man with a slight groin wound and two Spaniards with thigh and arm injuries.
Unlucky folks, but the true hazard of the event turns out not to be the bulls so much. Aside from the four gorings, "SOS Navarra, the regional emergency service, reported treating 17 people for alcoholic intoxication Thursday, six for falls and only five for bruises suffered during the morning bull run."
A powerful new instrument heading to space this Saturday is expected to send back long-sought answers about greenhouse gases, atmospheric cleansers and pollutants, and the destruction and recovery of the ozone layer. Only a cubic yard in size but laden with technical wizardry, the High-Resolution Dynamic Limb Sounder (HIRDLS - pronounced "Hurdles") will measure a slew of atmospheric chemicals at a horizontal and vertical precision unprecedented in a multi-year space instrument[...]
HIRDLS will capture the chemistry and dynamics of four layers of the atmosphere that together span a region 8 to 80 kilometers (5 to 50 miles) above Earth’s surface: the upper troposphere, the tropopause, the stratosphere, and the mesosphere.
I've about had enough of the "We should be using our money to solve problems down here" arguments against space programs.
Attorney General John Ashcroft received numerous detailed briefings last year regarding the criminal investigation of the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA agent's identity, during which he was told specific information relating to the potential culpability of several close political associates in the Bush administration, according to senior federal law-enforcement sources.
Among other things, the sources said, Ashcroft was provided extensive details of an FBI interview of Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political advisor. The two men have enjoyed a close relationship ever since Rove advised the Attorney General during the course of three of Ashcroft's political campaigns[...]
The briefings raise questions about the appropriateness of Ashcroft's involvement in the investigation, especially given his longstanding ties to Rove. Senior federal law-enforcement officials have expressed serious concerns among themselves that Ashcroft spent months overseeing the probe and receiving regular briefings regarding a criminal investigation in which the stakes were so high for the Attorney General's personal friends, political allies, and political party. One told me, "Attorneys General and U.S. Attorneys in the past traditionally recused for far less than this."
One senior federal law-enforcement official said that there appeared to be no restrictions regarding the extent of information provided Ashcroft: "Whatever the FBI knew, the Attorney General was able to know within days if he wanted to."
Interesting read, if not particularly the impending earthquake to which some have alluded.
Talk about thinking outside the (invisible glass) box...
A mathematician and philosopher, Mr. Mockus was rector of the National University in Bogotá, Colombia, before serving as mayor of that city for two terms, from 1995 to 2004. [...] Mr. Mockus, rather like the former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani but with a far defter touch, was determined to restore communal civility to Bogotá. He wore a Superman costume and called himself Supercitizen. During a water shortage he showered on television, turning off the water just after soaping up. Water consumption fell 14 percent. He asked citizens to pay 10 percent extra taxes; 63,000 did so. To reduce late-night violence, he closed bars at 1 a.m. He urged people to turn in their weapons (machetes and grenades as well as guns) and rewarded them with cash when they did so. The murder rate plunged by nearly three quarters.
Mimes were part of Mr. Mockus's diabolical plan. He first hired 20 professionals to follow, imitate and mock citizens who committed public incivilities like jaywalking, picking pockets and driving recklessly. So successful were the first mimes that 400 more were trained as "traffic mimes" to monitor pedestrians at street corners. Just how the good citizens of Bogotá responded to mimes holding up signs chiding their manners, I cannot say. To my knowledge no mimes met an untimely end. But the experiment was successful enough to be replicated in Lima, Peru.
Traffic mimes. Sweet.
Does this ring true to you?
Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon. It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question. The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush's records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.
Let's see, the only parts "destroyed" were the ones that are directly relevant to whether Bush shirked his duty, any paper backup copies are strangely missing as well, they've never mentioned this glitch before now, and the guy Bush hired to go through his records was unaware of it as well. Isn't that all very interesting?
Think I'm jumping to conclusions? Go take a peek at the exhaustively sourced AWOL Project. Then try to imagine what we would be hearing if this were Bill Clinton.
Don't you miss being a teenager?
Cops arriving at the Vineland accident scene found driver Carl Nunez, 18, naked from the waist down and noticed passenger Nicole Dougherty's underwear on the auto's passenger seat. Investigators also discovered an open bottle of Corona beer--and the broken remains of a second bottle--in the crumpled Mitsubishi Mirage. According to the accident report, witness Nery Veliz told cops that he was driving behind the speeding Mitsubishi and saw "a white female who appeared to be naked climb on top of the driver and move as if they were having sex." The vehicle then veered off the roadway, Veliz reported, first striking a mailbox and then slamming into the telephone pole. Neither Nunez or Doughtery, 18, was wearing a seat belt, according to investigators. Nunez was cited for driving without insurance, though additional charges could result from an ongoing police investigation.
CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. July 6, 2004. N=553 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 5.
I'm struck by the surprisingly low numbers for no opinion and that 2/3 of the respondents consider his trial lawyer background either a major or minor strength as vice president. The Bush campaign is going to have a rough time trying to get attacks to stick to Edwards. I think he's got the Teflon. And cute little kids. This was a great pick and testament to the Kerry team's political skills to have made such an obvious choice dramatic anyhow.
"As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of these people -- or if you have never heard of them. How about John Edwards?" (%)
Favorable 54
Unfavorable 16
Never heard of 12
No opinion 18
"As you may know, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has selected North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate. How would you rate John Kerry's choice of John Edwards for vice president? Would you rate this choice as excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?"
Excellent 28
Pretty Good 36
Only Fair 17
Poor 11
No Opinion 8
"Based on what you know about John Edwards, do you think he is qualified to serve as president if it becomes necessary, or not?"
Qualified 57
Not Qualified 29
No Opinion 14
"Do you think John Kerry's choice of John Edwards reflects favorably or unfavorably on Kerry's ability to make important presidential decisions?"
Favorable 64
Unfavorable 24
No Opinion 12
"As you may know, John Edwards is finishing his first six-year term in the U.S. Senate. Prior to that, Edwards had not served in any elected office. If he were elected vice president, do you think his limited political experience would be a major strength, a minor strength, a minor weakness, or a major weakness?"
Major Strength 17
Minor Strength 23
Minor Weakness 35
Major Weakness 20
No Opinion 5
"As you may know, before he was elected to the U.S. Senate, John Edwards was a successful trial lawyer who filed lawsuits against hospitals and companies in personal injury cases. If he were elected vice president, do you think his experience as a trial lawyer would be a major strength, a minor strength, a minor weakness, or a major weakness?"
Major Strength 26
Minor Strength 41
Minor Weakness 15
Major Weakness 12
No Opinion 6
Michael Moore has given his official OK for people to download Fahrenheit 9/11 for free through file-sharing networks "as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour." From Baghdad, Christopher Albritton reports:
Fahrenheit 9/11 has hit Baghdad in the pirated DVD stalls that line the lobbies of hotels and the concrete barriers along the Green Zone. I’m curious as to what the reaction among the Iraqis might be to the film.
I'm curious, too.
Update (4:15 pm): Not surprisingly, the film is a runaway hit in France.
They certainly couldn't do any worse than last time.
The presidential candidate told thousands of screaming supporters gathered in an airport hanger in Broward County, Florida, that he had discovered that Edwards’ two young children, aged six and four, were "good at maths."
"Those kids really know how to count," Kerry said. "I’ve given them a special duty in this election. We’re sending Jack and Emma Claire down there to help those Republicans in West Palm Beach count those votes." As the crowd erupted, Kerry boomed: "In 2004, not only does every vote in Florida count but every vote is going to be counted."
In a related story, Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced that his daughter Noelle has been tapped to head the task force looking into the list of Florida felons wrongly denied the right to vote.
Boing! NBC News Poll of 504 registered voters nationwide, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International on July 6, 2004. MoE ± 5.
Kerry/Edwards 49
Bush/Cheney 41
Nader/Camejo 4
Unsure 6
Without Nader, the lead stretches to:
Kerry/Edwards 54
Bush/Cheney 43
Unsure 3
Sure, it's a long way to November and national polls are less important than state ones and it's registered voters instead of likely voters and all the other standard caveats. Still, the Kerry/Edwards ticket is starting in great position. This week they will be visiting Florida, West Virginia, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, and North Carolina (represent!).
And they're off...
Eduoard Artus' Hospital Apoka is the coolest, creepiest timewaster I've seen in a long time. Wander around a bit and you'll find yourself drawn steadily in, but as the Modulator warns, it may contribute to weird dreams later.
Dr. Jung, paging Dr. Jung...
They ran the bulls in Pamplona yesterday. Nobody got gored and only five people were taken to the hospital afterwards. Fifteen have been killed in the half-mile race since 1910, which leads me to suspect that most years the bulls are just phoning it in.
Former Chicago Bulls basketball player Dennis Rodman was less impressed by the centuries-old run, which herds the bulls from their pens to the bullring for fights in the evening. "I wish I could've got closer. Hopefully tomorrow I will," Rodman, who escaped with a scrape on his arm, told Reuters.
[...]
A hard core of mainly U.S. runners come back every year and are still running the two- or three-minute race in their 60s. [...] Joseph Distler has run every year since 1967, has been gored three times and had a hip replacement because of one of the gorings. "I woke up at 4 o'clock with cramps in my stomach ... At my age there's only a few things that bring that: bulls and beautiful women," the 61-year-old said.
I'm pretty sure that at sixty-one, the list of things that could cause stomach cramps has more than two entries, but why quibble? The animal rights protestors were there again, naked as per usual (cf. "Spaniards are horny"). Much as I'd like to see that particular tactic adopted by every protest group, it doesn't seem like the best way to dissuade a bunch of guys pumped full of macho cheese. Just sayin'.
"People tend to think of [these bulls] as farm animals," Ross observed. Nothing, he says, could be further from the truth. The bulls that run during the San Fermín festival are bred to fight and can weigh over 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms). They also possess razor-sharp horns, keen intelligence, uncanny peripheral vision, and the ability to "turn on a dime," according to Ross. Underestimating them, he says, can be a fatal mistake. "They're the most aggressive animals that I know of."
Scary.
Rolled back into town late last night, sunburnt and sleepy, from a four-day stint in Hilton Head, SC, seeing how the other half lives. I can report that it looks like a whopping lot of fun to be stinky rich. I mean, I have such good tastes and yet no real capacity to indulge them. It's a tragedy, really, but you can help. Any donations are gratefully accepted and I promise they will be faithfully applied toward my personal enrichment.
Two extended weekends in a row without an internet connection were pretty unsettling, though. When can I get the satellite uplink chip installed in my neck? Are you listening Time-Warner? I'm willing to guinea pig it.
Anyhow, being 360 miles away from my wireless hub (and Froz being way the hell in California) left this site to lay fallow the past few days. I have some significant catching up to do at work and unpacking at home and various and sundry chores besides, so the landscape may remain barren over the next day and a half or so.
In the meantime, I'd like to congratulate John Kerry for grasping the bleeding obvious and selecting John Edwards as his running mate. North Carolina's 15 Electoral College votes are in play, baby. Big time. Just as the Democrats have to hold closely-contested Pennsylvania, the GOP has to hold North Carolina. Everybody is focused on the south right now, but I suspect Edwards' impact is more likely to be felt in the Rust Belt states, including Pennsylvania. Go Johns.
Okay, back to the grindstone. I'll be talking at y'all again shortly.
Paul Krugman on Fahrenheit 9/11
Also, watch Irish reporter Carole Coleman's interview with GWB from a couple of weeks ago to see what real journalism looks like, as opposed to the ass-kissing and brown-nosing we get from the American press. The saddest thing: it's the best I've seen Bush do in an interview so far. (hat tip: poorditchingboy)
The engine firing went perfectly, and Cassini has settled into orbit around Saturn. The adventure begins. The closest-ever pictures of the rings are up at Ciclops, but I gotta say: they're a little underwhelming. Higher resolution images should come in through the day.
The main rings are extremely thin. They stretch 70,000 kilometres from their inner to outer edge, but are only about 100 metres thick. They are made of loose ice particles in all sorts of sizes. "They go from the size of houses down to the finest ice particles, like the snow you might ski on in Utah" says Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini's imaging team and an expert on the rings.
Voyager showed that thousands of gaps break the main rings up into ringlets that are often only a few kilometres wide. In the new pictures from Cassini, it is clear that some ringlets are narrower still, maybe only half a kilometre or less. The pictures also show that they have very sharp edges, even though the ice particles should be bouncing off each other and blurring the edges of the rings. "It's very mysterious - they must be held sharp by some mechanism," says Porco. "In some cases it is done by moons, but with many of the edges we don't know the mechanism."
That title should generate some search engine hits...
The ACLU is challenging a new Virginia law banning nude summer camps for teenagers, saying it violates the constitutional right to privacy. Take a second and let the irony of that sink in. Okay. The Virginia camp is the third of its kind in the nation, with others in Florida and Arizona. Honestly, I don't have strong feelings either way about the constitutional questions, though I like the idea of nude teenagers as much as the next dirty old man. I suspect the federal courts will say it's up to the states and let the law stand. However, one does question the wisdom of naming the place (not making this up) Camp White Tail.
