Ten Gallon Liberal
The all-new hip-hop GOP spins on its head
"Michael Steele, you be da man!" That was Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) dishing out mad props to RNC chairman Michael Steele at the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting this weekend.Steele calls for the GOP to go "hip-hop" and...The latest in weird Massachusetts dental news
Out on Cape Cod, a man checked out a wallet at Wal-Mart for possible purchase. And he found 10 teeth inside–one with a filling. This is a story we'll probably never know, but wouldn't you like to know what led to someone storing teeth in Wal-Mart's...Country First
At the edge of an economic chasm, with livelihoods and international reputation on the line, what do you think is most important for Congress to do? It's a time for problem-solving, not win-at-all-costs Machiavellian martial arts, right? And Republicans want the...Apocalypse by Walker, Texas Moron?
What a weird time it is among the right wingers. World Net Daily, believe it or not, is still consumed by a quixotic quest to prove, finally, once and for all, that Obama really was born in Indonesia and Kenya and is a Marxist intruder. And no, I ain't linking to...MacAmerica, Thane of Cawdor and Columbus hereafter?
What if America was "discovered" by a Scotsman? Bring out the haggis, baby, because apparently Christopher Columbus was in fact Pedro Scotto, Italian-Scot, and had blond hair gone white, light eyes and freckles. Claiming Columbus isn't exactly something...The Man Who Was Thursday
I just discovered this gem, a 1908 novella by G.K. Chesterton, thanks to a recommendation from Jed Berry when I had the pleasure of speaking to him recently ("The Debut of a Cycling Umbrellist," March 5, 2009). The prose is densely Victorian, as if just...Can you dust for fletching?
Maybe it's because I'm reading a mystery and writing something science-fictiony right now, but this sounds like the beginning of a very weird plot. A woman in the Bronx was hit by an arrow as she opened the passenger door of her car to let a friend out at a...Stories Without End
Someone very important to me has died unexpectedly. Harris Mills was a veteran of two of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific during World War II, Guadalcanal and the under-reported battle for the tiny island of Peleliu. The reason I bring Sergeant Mills up in a...Sometimes when I'm driving… on the road at night… I see two headlights coming toward me.
Remote blogging is a fine path to amusement. Which is to say, in a tough time and from my current undisclosed location, I have checked into the blogosphere and discovered something that relieves the synapses of their weightiness. I still can't figure out why...The Unintentional Anteater
Thanks to following a link on a story comment, I discovered this quite interesting piece at Salon, about a fellow who sees ants in his cereal and grabs a handful to munch anyway. Sort of an exuberant omnivorous experience, I suppose, from a writer with quite an...In Cold Floodlights
Last night I dreamed I was playing a lot of shows in an indie rock festival. Truman Capote was in charge. I was pleasantly surprised by how much he paid. ADDITIONAL: Has anyone noticed that this cartoonist dude Pat Oliphant, even if he's everywhere all the time...The Burns Event Horizon
Ken Burns annoys me to no end. He makes okay films attached to important subjects, then seems to believe that his film is equal in importance to the subject. When once I interviewed him, he claimed to have singlehandedly revived jazz in America. What a knob. Louis...Origami will destroy the world
Ever since the day my pal Dan and I threw a pot lid in the air and got some really incredible UFO photos, I've not been convinced of the efficacy of photos to prove much of anything. So witness this shot, currently making the rounds as a contest winner and...Torture: it worked, only it didn't…
You know how those crazy liberals kept saying torture is wrong and doesn't work? Well, the Bush administration's Exhibit A for the efficacy of torture, it turns out, is proof of just that, according to a Washington Post story (and a great commentary on the...Simian flu?
Remember when everybody was all afraid of the bird flu? I say remain afraid of the bird flu, and get even more afraid of other strains. If you've noticed a lack of posts for quite a few days running, that's because I have been suffering from what I am...Obama (hearts) Strangelove
Why does Obama persist in being so very wise about so many other things while ripping to shreds the clear limits of executive branch power just like his idiot predecessor? And what are we going to do about it? I'd rather just be able to like what he does across...Heat and Light
The political news is annoying me to no end. Obama, so promising in so many ways (and he remains so, despite the following), is embracing and exceeding Bush's absurdist claims of unchecked executive power. I'm not quite ready to get all worked up to refight,...Robots finally get cool
As soon as I can dig it out, I'm going to post some selections from a list of great SF I've held onto since 1983. In the meantime, I want to issue kudos to someone who is finally making sure that the future is what it was cracked up to be back in 1977. Well,...Obama–a Slight Return?
Interesting, even promising in light of how much he's frustrated civil libertarians like me with certain actions, that Obama did the right thing (well mostly) in releasing Bush torture memos yesterday. The immunization of torturers from prosecution is certainly a...Sharpen up your conspiracy pencils
Mark Twain said, "To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman."Who would believe that the Bushies wanted to wiretap members of Congress? Oh, sorry. I would too. But who would believe that a congresswoman would be on the phone...Nuremberg redux
It's hard to know who most deserves the Up Is Down Award right now, especially when it comes to the Room 101 case currently unfolding to reveal that Bush and his apologists really were every bit as bad as his most vociferous detractors said.I mean, which of these...The problem with a big mouth
Forget the Super Bowl. This is the event I'm waiting for, as promised by Sean Hannity's television antics:Charles Grodin: You're for torture. Hannity: I am for enhanced interrogation. Grodin: You don't believe it's torture. Have you ever been...Refiftance is futile, good firs
This one will play well in these heady days of Royalists, Whigs and Tories. Mitt Romney: "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they are the party of the monarchists."Rumor has it he later called Arlen Specter and said, "Gird thyself, sir, for a...Blowing the Whistle
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has had a rough time making her whistleblower allegations known–when Ashcroft was Attorney General, he shut her down using the state secrets privilege. Her fairly complicated story, unfortunately, also doesn't have a ton...Mad Science and Twisted Silverware
The fringes of science always prove the most fruitful, at least if it's fiction you're pursuing. And when real discoveries come from that intriguing zone, they're usually humdingers. But there's big danger there. Even (or especially?) earnest...My new favorite site
Awkward family photos? Oh, yes, they've got 'em!It's like the whole pain of childhood concentrated and delivered via a shocking blow to the head. Awesome. And first up–Lionel Richie's long-lost pale cousins, 1985, just after they listened to the...Peacenik interrogators and their excellent results
A real bellwether? Reminds me of the great fried chicken and brownies ending of White Noise somehow. (From Daily Kos) There you'll also find some discussion of Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, who put the lie to the reprehensible supporters of torture by doing...Turns out the Bushies thought Iraq was officially a Christian war, too
Talk about being left speechless. I just checked out the formerly classified cover sheets to briefings produced by Rumsfeld's Pentagon during the early days of the Iraq War. It's hard to count the ways in which they are offensive. Long story short, they show...More, and Worse, Torture Allegations
Binyam Mohamed, released from Guantanamo three months ago without charge, and the Air Force lawyer assigned to represent him have levelled some fairly horrifying allegations. I haven't seen much about this before in the American press, though there is a little out...A short debate
"'I want to find out if [waterboarding] is torture,' [Eric] Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture." (That's shock jock Eric Mancow,...So it really was the Empire they were hoping for after all…
Funny how all the commenting dried up with that last post… And for today, we've got a fascinating look back at 2002, when the Weekly Standard, that bastion of neocon philosophizing, had the good grace to explain just how screwed up we really got as a nation...The hazy liberal high of arroz y frijoles
Certain members of the right are concerned Sonia Sotomayor's fringhteningly Puerto Rican diet may affect her decisions. This is chilling stuff from The Hill:Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz,...Philosophy Monday
The disintegration of the GOP has provided no small amount of entertainment, from watching Michael Steele take the GOP to the masses with his new "off the hook" party of "hip-hop" to witnessing multiple apologies as underlings (i.e., congressmen)...My Fellow Post-Protozoans
Some cool news: Amateurs collaborate on a grand scale make a Google Earth extension so anyone can look at the details of North Korea. Now you too can peer at the glories of Kim Jong-Il's summer home.Some bad news: The methods we've used to search for life (or...A mysterious creature in Vermont
A lake monster in New England? Burlington's Eric Olsen captured some interesting footage of something in Lake Champlain. Here's a stabilized version of the footage–Olsen got tired of all the attention and seems to have disallowed embedding of his video....The Invertebrate-American lobby; Baptists gone loco
Many Americans, of course, want universal health care. Large numbers of us want a version that lowers costs enough to force insurance companies to give up and actually cover people instead of devising ever more ingenious methods to avoid coverage and turn bigger...Another glimpse into how torture happened
How come the New York Times read emails full of damning information about the genesis of the infamous torture memos and came up with a story mainly saying that even the memo's detractors agreed that torture was legal? Freaking liberal media.It bears noting as well...Polite conversation
It is been deemed, by certain omnipresent naysayers, a bad thing to repeatedly focus on torture. And of course it is bad, in that it means they have to embrace one of the nadirs of human behavior repeatedly and openly in order to defend the indefensible. So it seemed...Rain, a bit of mulling over of things perhaps mullworthy, and an underground city
What do anonymity and the ease of commenting mean for the state of debate on the Internet? I mull this over all the time as the wake of commenting unspools behind my posts or some other blogger's. Certainly there's a pile-on effect–at DailyKos, people...Mars gets all Easter Island-y, sort of
I'm fascinated by pareidolia, the human ability to see order even when there is none, as manifested by seeing Jesus in your burrito and other such stuff. And largely with the aid of the Internet, a new world of such possibilities has opened up. You can find sites...Another year, another set of flying muttonchops
The World Beard and Moustache Championships have culminated in a fine set of awards. And I can only note that possessing fulminant facial hair seems to be accompanied by a very particular antiquarian dandy fashion sense. I also note with sadness the absence of Todd...Motoring to Motor City
The ten gallon hat will be hung upon a peg for the rest of the week while I motor to Motor City, but the nattering should re-ensue come next week.In the meantime, here are a few fun reads to enjoy. The first controllable nanotech gear has been created. Very cool. Now...Back from Detroit
And it was just as fascinating as that stretch of Hadley where all the big boxes have set up shop, only there was more of it. I always try to find things in a place that are unique to that place, and it's harder and harder to do. It feels as if either a) Americans...Weird in Wasilla
I'm not sure what's weirder–Sarah Palin's insanely strange resignation speech, or that, until the zoom-out, it looks as if Palin's speech is being witnessed by UFOs. Near as I can tell from that bramble of words, she resigned because of one or...Senator Smalley
What a long, strange trip it's been. But Senator Franken ought to add some drama to the proceedings once he gets his dander up–he's very good at calling the right wing on their methodology. I just hope he never wears the Smalley sweater into the...Turns out terrorism is still far too easy for people to accomplish, unfortunately
Today brings us two stark examples of what happens when you react to terrorism in the manner Bush & Co insisted upon. There are many more successful examples of combatting terrorism we could have followed–the UK, for instance, dealt with many years of IRA...The politics of scientists
A Pew survey has come up with the following very interesting numbers:The percentage of scientists who consider themselves Republican: 6("More than half of the scientists surveyed (55%) say they are Democrats, compared with 35% of the public.") The percentage...Why you're brilliant (or, possibly, not)
Those goldanged scientists have discovered some very interesting things of late about heredity and the brain. Turns out it's far more complicated than people used to think, with genes being expressed or not according to which of the parents contributed what and...Webinating from each end
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo makes an interesting, if oversimplified, argument about the right wing's online presence: I'm often asked why the right doesn't have a muscular online news presence that mirrors the reporting-intensive, fact-heavy...Fly Me to the Moon
NASA's turn toward endlessly puttering around in low Earth orbit since the heady days of the moonshots irritates the kid in me. (It was, of course, 40 years ago today that Neil Armstrong did his lunar tarantella.) In the late 70s, many of us were drawing up plans...A Hole in the Head, a Hole in the Sky
Did they really find a daguerreotype of Phineas Gage, he of the giant railroad-spike-through-head caper? These folks claim it is so, and the photo does match Gage's life mask. He seems pretty stern about the whole thing in the picture.ADDITIONAL: Spaceweather.com...Full Beagle howl, cosmic coincidence
A UMass-Amherst doctoral candidate, Kathryn Lord, designed a study of dog barks. Some of the reporting that's coming from her study (but not this very interesting article) seems to be missing her point. She says that dogs don't bark to convey very specific...Those heady days of English 112
I taught Freshman English at UMass for several years as a grad student. Eventually I taught an Honors class, which was a real pleasure, almost like an upper-level course. Before that, I did have a few (well, 2) good students in those years. Never have I seen a more...Detonations of Fist-clenched Hope
Nicholson Baker, who will forever be canonized among my favorite writers for his short but absurdly, beautifully funny The Mezzanine, offers his thoughts on the Kindle, "an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization." This is a man who, for several...There's a fine line between clever and stupid. Well, sometimes.
Is Bill O'Reilly the dumbest person on television (stiff competition, I know)? The definitive answer here: How much cultural frisson can one human bear? That answer here, in which William Shatner performs Sarah Palin's farewell speech on Conan...They are very small ducks
My researches upon the Intertoobz have revealed to me a new and wonderful site. I give you Emails from Crazy People, and heartily suggest that, if you are in need of some comic relief on this rainy day, you examine this exchange between a tenant and a concerned...Moldavian dentist/lawyer still crazy
My favorite part of the awesome "birther" movement is its current lawyer-in-chief, Orly Taitz. Not only is her name suggestive of some sort of nebulous and non-specific foreign-ness, her accent and her look are a sort of amalgamation of the Gabor sisters and...Shutting down debate
Interesting to note that the ginned-up astroturf campaign to keep our awesome for-profit healthcare system (best in the world except for 36 better ones, including leading lights like Costa Rica, Andorra and Malta, said the World Health Organization a few years ago)...Aw-shucks theater
Those townhall disrupters–just reg'lar folk, out to raise their voices? I'm sure some of them are. Many of them appear to be frightened people who are old enough to oppose government in healthcare while participating in Medicare, the government...E-Edition
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